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Economists have traditionally had a keen interest in the effects of overall labor demand on the economic well-being of different population groups, particularly disadvantaged groups. The stronger the effects of overall demand on the economic well-being of the poor, the more support there is for boosting demand to "solve" poverty. But an alternative view is that the poor's problems have complicated social causes, and cannot be solved except by changes in social institutions. To put it plainly: are some people poor because the economy lacks jobs for them, or are these people poor because of something they lack? This debate has resurfaced in discussions of how to help the "underclass." Some researchers, such as William Julius Wilson (1987) and John Kasarda (1985, 1989, 1990), have attributed the growth of the underclass to the decline of central city manufacturing jobs. Other researchers, such as Lawrence Mead (1992), have attributed the growth of the underclass to cultural changes within the underclass community that have weakened the work ethic. The traditional view of economists was that aggregate economic demand has particularly strong benefits for disadvantaged groups such as the poor, the less educated, and blacks (Okun, 1973; Clark and Summers, 1981; Blank and Blinder, 1986; Blank, 1989). The benefits of aggregate growth for the poor seem to have weakened in the 1980s. Despite the long 1980s expansion, the income distribution has widened, and poverty has been little improved (Cutler and Katz, 1991; Blank, 1991). These 1980s problems for the poor are thought to be due to decreasing relative demand for unskilled workers, and a slowdown in the relative growth of college-educated versus less skilled workers (Bound and Johnson, 1992; Katz and Murphy, 1992). The evidence for this theory is mostly indirect. With only one time series on the U.S. macroeconomy as evidence, it is difficult to tell whether the effects of aggregate demand on poverty have really diminished. Because of the limited evidence in one time ...