Inheritance of Poverty or Inheritance of Place? The Emerging Consensus on Neighborhoods and Stratification

Sociologists have long sought to understand the mechanisms by which socioeconomic disadvantage persists over time and across generations. They have paid particular attention to understanding why poverty appears to be so deep, obdurate, and lasting for certain social groups, such as African Americans. Whereas economists theorize human welfare as the end product of ratio-nal choices made by individuals and house-holds within free markets subject to resource and informational constraints, sociologists emphasize the stratifying effects of social structures that embed institutionalized prac-tices of exclusion and exploitation withi