by Jim Rose in human capital, labour economics, labour supply Tags: code of the street, human capital, labour economics, sociology

Dionissi Aliprantis wrote a superb paper on how the social skills developed to survive in the inner cities of America are not the skills that help you graduate from high school and get a job.

In the NLSY97, 26% of black inner-city youth report seeing someone shot by age 12, and 43% of black inner-city youth report the same by age 18.

The code of the street, the street smarted skills that inner-city black youth learn as teenagers to stay alive, do not pay off in regular society:

growing up in the ’hood means learning to some degree the code of the streets, the prescriptions and proscriptions of public behaviour. He must be able to handle himself in public, and his parents, no matter how decent they are, may strongly encourage him to learn the rules

The behaviours that do not help you survive in the street of the poor inner cities of America include include doing well in school, being civil to others, and speaking Standard English.

These skills that are the antithesis of the code of the street are exactly the skills valued by employers, especially employers of low paid workers. Employers of the low paid essentially want to recruit people who are friendly and reliable.

Dionissi Aliprantis found that exposure to street violence during childhood explains 20-35% of the high school dropout rate of inner-city youth.