|Peter Boettke|
Watching the peaceful protests transform into a riot in Baltimore on Monday was horrific, but it should also trigger some serious thinking in the social and behavioral sciences as to the underlying causes and dynamics at works in the legitimation crisis that afflicts so much of the urban ecology today in the US. Like everyone else I have my pet peeves and pet theories --- public respect for persons and property; drug war, militarization of police, etc. But as an economist, I also think we should focus like a laser beam on the policies that have limited economic opportunity in these communities, especially for the youth.
Years ago when teaching an Honors Course at NYU (Morris Academic Program it was called then) on Race, Gender and Inequality, I used William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears (1996). Of course, Wilson's book is a rich sociological analysis of the problems caused by the elimination of work opportunities in the urban landscape. As an economist influenced by Thomas Sowell's Markets and Minorities and Walter Williams's The State Against Blacks --- both books that I had studied in depth in my labor economics class in graduate school --- I tended to focus on those aspects of Wilson's analysis that explained how the bottom-rung on the economic ladder was cut off, and how it you cut off the bottom-rung, you truncate the ability of individuals to climb up the ladder, and what the consequences of that are.
Since the time Wilson wrote his book the situation has not improved, but only grown worse. We have raised the costs of hiring, and the lowered the costs of being unemployed. This, of course, is the theme of Casey Mulligan's outstanding book, The Redistribution Recession (2012). The consequences of these policies are far greater than simply the sluggish recovery of the job market after 2008, but go deep into the problems we face in our inner-cities.
We need to recruit some of the best minds in economics to think long and hard about urban issues. Paul Romer is doing so; as is Ed Glaeser, and this year's Clark Medalist Roland Fryer has been particularly innovative in the way he has brought the economic way of thinking to bear on the difficulty issues of health, education and human welfare in the urban environment throughout the US.
I hope that Fryer's Clark Medal attracts many young economists to pay attention to these issues, and to think about the fundamental market economic responses that are required to address the situation in the wake of the legacy of failed public policies and corrupt public administration.
Here's an interesting article along the same lines.
http://conference.nber.org/confer/2015/Macro15/Barnichon_Figura.pdf?utm_campaign=Hutchins+Center&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=17256480&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9t_E8cZCBku0UuV-aXydJMrshQ6su99Ie8EkCNcnXPrWRsgEW5HmKts-lJS4MZdVhXZngSxz2dP39iN_UlavB8NQDbXw&_hsmi=17256480
Posted by: Mark | April 29, 2015 at 10:56 AM
Thank you for the recommendations.
Posted by: Michael Hubbard | April 29, 2015 at 10:24 PM