Socialism and the Decline of the Black Family

Children need fathers, but social fragmentation gives an advantage to those who seek centralized power

By Jason Riley. Excerpts:

"socialism’s impact on the traditional family structure is no less concerning. Children from intact families are more likely to finish school and avoid poverty. The absence of fathers is strongly correlated with teen parenthood, drug addiction and involvement with the criminal justice system. The cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote that “every known human society rests firmly on the learned nurturing behavior of men” and that civilization “depends upon social inventions that will make each generation of males want to nurture women and children.”"

"socialists such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels dismissed the traditional family as a tool of oppression"

"many of the social and economic problems in low-income black communities stem from the sad fact that some 70% of black children are born to unwed parents and nearly 45% live with a single mother."

"Asians are the highest earners, followed by whites, Hispanics and blacks. Similarly, Asians have the highest marriage rates, followed by whites, Hispanics and blacks. Maybe it’s no coincidence."

"Following emancipation, one of the first things black people did was seek out spouses and children from whom they had been forcibly separated during slavery."

"Between 1890 and 1950, black men and women married earlier and were more likely to be married by 35 than their white peers, Mr. Squires writes. That suggests black attitudes toward marriage and child rearing today are the product of incentives and circumstances that developed long after the end of slavery. “More than 70 percent of black children were born to married parents in 1965—a century after the abolition of slavery,” Mr. Squires writes. “Today, only 30 percent are."

"The black family was more intact after three centuries of chattel slavery than after three generations of the federal government’s ‘war’ on poverty.”" 

The Trump Administration Gets Civil Rights Back on Track

With ‘disparate impact’ theory, the EEOC long ago departed from its mission to prevent discrimination

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"Hubert Humphrey, the liberal Democrat from Minnesota who shepherded the bill through the Senate, insisted the act didn’t “provide that any preferential treatment in employment shall be given to Negroes or to any other persons or groups.” If anyone can find “any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin,” he said, “I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there.”"

"Supporters noted repeatedly that Title VII’s language was unambiguous. Racial discrimination on the part of the employer had to be intentional and couldn’t be inferred from disproportionate outcomes in the hiring and promotion of minorities."

"within three years EEOC staffers began redefining “discrimination,” sidestepping the statutory language of the bill and ignoring the legislative history. They determined that statistical disparities could be used as evidence of hiring bias and that employers could be held liable for racial imbalance in the workplace, even if it was unintentional. Alfred Blumrosen, the EEOC’s first compliance chief and one of the people who drafted its initial disparate-impact guidance, later admitted that the agency’s power didn’t “flow from any clear congressional grant of authority” and that it “required a reading of the statute contrary to the plain meaning.”" 

"the EEOC’s rogue actions were endorsed by an activist judiciary. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), the Supreme Court said hiring practices that were “neutral on their face, and even neutral in terms of intent” could be unlawful if they resulted in racial imbalances. The decision gave employers an incentive to use racial preferences in hiring to avoid being sued for discrimination." 

Requiring the SAT Test Boosts Student Success

After we started requiring entrance exams at Chapman University, graduation rates more than doubled

Letter to The WSJ. 

"I well understand the frustration of the University of California’s math and science professors who are urging that college-entrance exams be reinstated as an admission requirement (“California Professors Want Entrance Exams Back,” U.S. News, June 2).

When I became president of Chapman University in 1991, we didn’t require college-entrance exams. Many considered that a badge of honor. If, however, academic success is measured by a school’s ability to nurture its students through graduation, we were failing. Only 38% of the students who started as freshmen at Chapman graduated four to six years later. That compared to a 62% graduation rate for the top 10-ranked colleges in our U.S. News & World Report category.

The reason for our low graduation rate wasn’t hard to find. We found across a large sample of competing schools that the correlation between entrance-exam scores and graduation rates was more than double that for any other admission requirement, including high-school GPAs and class standing.

Those findings led us to require SAT/ACT entrance exams. We steadily increased the minimum admission score over the 25 years I served as president. That strategy worked: Our graduation rate more than doubled to 79% over that same period. Even more important, our faculty told me that raising the academic bar resulted in a more vibrant classroom experience and a richer campus life.

Jim Doti

Former president, Chapman University"

The Academy Rethinks the SAT

University of California faculty say that when tests were dropped, student learning fell

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"in . . . 2020 . . . the University of California . . . [decided to] drop standardized tests as an admissions requirement . . . The experiment has been a failure, as more than 750 professors in STEM disciplines . . . now admit"

"preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics"

"Test scores “add substantially to UC’s ability to predict student success” beyond high school grades, especially for minority groups, the faculty report said."

"the university “does not appear to use standardized test scores in a way that amplifies racial disparities.” Without test scores, admissions would hinge on inflated grades, extracurricular activities and essays."

"“for three consecutive years, 20-30% of UC Berkeley first-semester calculus students who participated in mathematical diagnostic testing displayed severe preparation deficits.”"

"current admissions standards cannot “reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors"

[they were] "admitting students to STEM programs “without a reliable measure of whether they are prepared to succeed."

"UC San Diego . . . found one in eight of the school’s freshmen had math skills below high-school level" 

That was "a 30-fold increase since 2020" 

Do Immigration Quotas Benefit Natives?

From Jeffrey Miron.

"In 1921 and 1924, Congress set nationality-based quotas for immigration.

Recent research looks at the impact

on the intergenerational mobility of US-born men. [The authors use] county-level measure[s] of exposure to the quotas … [and] census data … to link US-born sons to their adult outcomes and trace family background, geographic location, and occupational status over time.

Outcomes differed by race:

[T]he quotas slowed intergenerational mobility among US-born white men. … For [them] the negative effects of the quotas were smaller for sons of wealthier fathers. … US-born white men from more exposed counties [also] earned substantially lower wages in adulthood.

Alternatively,

[f]or black men, quota exposure was associated with increased intergenerational mobility, although [the results] … cannot rule out the possibility of no effect. [T]he quotas may have reduced competition for lower-skilled urban jobs, modestly improving occupational prospects for black men.

The most likely explanation for the quotas’ effects

is that immigrants complement native workers by raising their productivity and enabling them to specialize in higher-quality tasks. … [Indeed,] the negative mobility effects were nearly twice as large for white men living in counties with more reliance on non-English-speaking immigrant workers."

California’s Never-Ending Race Preferences

Again activists attempt to gut the Golden State’s ban on affirmative action

By William McGurn. Excerpts:

"California’s constitutional battle is rooted in an amendment, Proposition 209, which the state’s voters approved in 1996. Proposition 209 forbids discrimination against or preferential treatment for anyone “on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin” in “public employment, public education, or public contracting.” That’s clear enough, which is why activists are always trying to gut it."

"The 2023 version of ACA 7 would have allowed the state to fund programs for specific groups “if those programs are established or otherwise implemented by the State for purposes of increasing the life expectancy of, improving educational outcomes for, or lifting out of poverty specific groups based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, or marginalized genders, sexes, or sexual orientations.” But Fair Admissions made clear that such measures would be unconstitutional."

"So the new ACA 7 involves a change in scope. It would modify Proposition 209 by narrowing the ban on discrimination in “public education” to cover only “higher education admissions and enrollment.” That would open the door to racial considerations in K-12 education and in college and university financial aid."

"“an African American student would be given grants, while a student of any other race would be saddled with student loans, despite having equal (or even greater) financial need.”"

"result of a more generous financial-aid package going to a wealthy black student than to a poor Asian student." 

Bank Deregulation, New Businesses, and Race and Gender

From Jeffrey Miron. 

"Women and minorities start businesses at significantly lower rates than men and whites.

One study examines whether this disparity reflects, in part, access to financing, which

has long been recognized as a major obstacle to business success, particularly for racial minorities.

By measuring the availability of credit before and after passage of major banking bills, the study finds that

the deregulation of interstate banking in the United States between 1994 and 2021 narrowed gender and racial disparities in entrepreneurship by expanding and improving banking services, reducing discrimination in the financial market, and narrowing gaps in firm performance.

Once more, deregulation enables positive change through the free market."

Does Competition Reduce Discimination?

Evidence from College Football

By Jeffrey Miron. 

"A standard economic view holds that markets will moderate some kinds of discrimination because “profit” maximizing organizations will recognize that discrimination is costly to their bottom line or other goals.

A recent study looked to the integration of college football in the 1970s for supporting evidence. By comparing conference-wide rankings and team win percentages before and after a team integrated, the study found that

poorly performing teams, potentially seeking to improve their win rate, choose to integrate.

Also,

worse teams were more likely to integrate than better teams… A likely explanation … is that poorly performing teams integrated to attract talented players.

These results indicate that

firms with low profits stop discriminating, or discriminate less, in a bid to increase profitability.

Somewhere, Gary Becker is smiling."

Minimum Wages and Racial Disparities

Job losses and earnings reductions from minimum wage increases between 2005 and 2019 were much more prevalent for black workers, especially black men, and were minimal for white workers.

By David Neumark and Jyotsana Kala. Excerpt:

"Our research uses data from the American Community Survey between 2005 and 2019 to examine the effects of minimum wage increases on black workers and their relative impact compared with that of white workers. We studied not only teenagers—the focus of much existing research—but also other lower-skilled groups, including workers under the age of 30 and those without a high school degree.

Our findings indicate that job losses from minimum wage increases were much more prevalent for black workers, especially black men, and were minimal for white workers. For example, among black male workers under the age of 30 without a high school degree, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage reduced employment by 4.1 percent on average. In contrast, our research finds no evidence of reduced employment for white workers with the same characteristics, even though the wages of both black and white workers increased by a similar degree.

Considering the wage and employment effects together, we found that higher minimum wages have decreased earnings for lower-skilled black workers. For example, within the same group of black male workers, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage led to a 4.8 percent average reduction in earnings. In contrast, we found no evidence of reduced earnings for white workers with the same characteristics. In fact, for several of the lower-skilled groups we studied, minimum wage increases tended to increase earnings for white workers.

Because there is substantial residential segregation by race in the United States, the concentration of the minimum wages’ adverse effects on black workers implies that their adverse effects are also concentrated in heavily black neighborhoods. Indeed, our research finds that the adverse effects of minimum wage increases fell disproportionately on people of all races living in areas with a high black population share, worsening the adverse effects of minimum wages on black workers living in these areas relative to workers living elsewhere. In some cases, the accumulation of adverse effects for black workers and black neighborhoods implies that large differences in minimum wages could account for roughly 40 percent of the gap in employment rates for lower-skilled workers between areas with high and low black population shares."

DEI Is a Threat to Americans’ Health

By Stanley Goldfarb. Excerpts:

"They changed [medical schools] their curricula to teach economic and social lessons that ladder up to the false claim that America is systemically racist. The LCME [Liaison Committee on Medical Education] has tacitly approved this shift by issuing vague standards that give medical schools far too much leeway. The resulting lack of rigor allows unprepared students to slide through undemanding courses while undercutting the preparation needed to become excellent doctors."

"The traditional two years of pre-clinical education required to become a doctor has been significantly reduced at more than a third of medical schools. This gives short shrift to the foundational curriculum in genetics, biochemistry, biostatistics and epidemiology."

"At 80% of M.D.-granting schools, the foundational courses in basic science and clinical skills are now graded pass/fail"

"The first part of the national licensure exam that determined residency placement has also been changed to pass/fail"

"a growing number of medical students lack a strong grasp of basic medical knowledge."

"At UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine . . . more than 50% of students failed basic tests on family medicine, pediatrics and emergency medicine. Nationwide, the percentage of medical students who pass the first part of the licensure exam has fallen every year since 2020, dropping from 97% to 89%"

"Even liberal medical journals have begun to question the state of medical education. A 2025 New England Journal of Medicine article on the use of pass/fail in medical school asked, “Is ‘Good Enough’ Good Enough?”" 

Black America Needs a Moral Rejuvenation

Stop whining about racism, honor Martin Luther King’s legacy, and confront the enemy within

By Robert L. Woodson Sr. Excerpts:

"In a single year, more black lives are destroyed by this violence [black-on-black violence] than were killed by the Ku Klux Klan in four decades of terror."

"Civil-rights leaders and politicians remain conspicuously silent, waiting instead for the next police shooting or racial controversy they can exploit for media attention and moral posturing."

"Consider the massive pandemic-relief fraud in Minneapolis, where nearly a quarter-billion dollars meant to feed hungry children was stolen. Whistleblowers raised alarms early. But every question was deflected with accusations of racism"

"We once endured conditions far worse than today without losing our moral compass. During Jim Crow—when racism was written into law—black neighborhoods were safer than today. Elders were respected. Children could walk the streets without fear. Families were intact, churches were full, and black marriage rates during the Great Depression were higher than for any other group in America."

"leadership shifted from moral suasion to political patronage. Welfare replaced mutual aid. Bureaucrats replaced neighbors. Racial grievance replaced dignity. Poor blacks were told they could be redeemed only by outsiders, while a growing civil-rights industry prospered by managing their despair." 

Affirmative Action Is Finally Waning

Law-school data shows that racial preferences have diminished since the justices’ 2023 decision.

By Richard Sander and Henry Kim. Mr. Sander is a law professor at UCLA and co-author of “Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.” Mr. Kim is a research scientist at UCLA. Excerpts:

"University leaders, including law-school deans, had warned before the 2023 decision that ending racial preferences would dramatically diminish minority enrollment at professional schools and elite colleges. So far, the opposite is true at law schools. The total number of black and Hispanic students matriculating at law schools has risen more than 5% over the past two years.

There are two key reasons for this seemingly counterintuitive result. First, the number of black and Hispanic applicants to law school jumped by more than 30% over the two cycles following Fair Admissions. So far in the 2025-26 admissions cycle, black and Hispanic applications to law school are again growing faster than those from whites and Asians.

Something similar happened at the University of California after voters approved Proposition 209, a 1996 ballot measure prohibiting racial preferences in state programs. The rate at which black and Hispanic applicants accepted offers of admission rose across UC’s eight undergraduate campuses. The more a school reduced the weight it gave to race in the wake of Proposition 209, the more its uptake rate from accepted minority applicants increased.

The implication is that blacks and Hispanics prefer attending schools where they’ve been admitted under the same standards that apply to everyone else. They likely recognize that degrees untainted by preferences will have greater market value."

This 1,300-Page Anticapitalist History Gets a Few Things Wrong

Sven Beckert's Capitalism: A Global History is...not a reliable history

By Phil Magness.

"Adam Smith, widely considered the first major theorist of capitalism, abhorred the institution of slavery. "Whatever work [a slave] does…can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own," he wrote in 1776. In an earlier lecture, Smith indicted laws that "strengthen the authority of the masters and reduce the slaves to a more absolute subjection." The plantation system at the core of this economy was not a competitive market; planters had secured a state-sanctioned "monopoly against all the rest of the world" and "indemnif[ied] themselves by the exorbitancy of their profites for their expensive and thriftless method of cultivation." Smith singled out the exceptional cruelty found in the British colonies of "Jamaica and Barbadoes, where slaves are numerous and objects of jealousy [and] punishments even for slight offences are very shocking."

Yet in Capitalism: A Global History, Sven Beckert calls colonial Barbados "an almost perfectly Smithian economy, with utility-maximizing individuals creating a newly productive division of labor"—indeed a model of market capitalism. A simple contrast of those two characterizations is enough to raise the question of whether Beckert bothered to consult what Smith actually wrote about West Indian slavery.

In the 19th century, slaveowners and abolitionists alike noted the tensions between the emerging industrial economy and the plantation system. The former depended on freedom of movement and on choice in career and industry. The latter grafted elements of feudal hierarchy and coerced labor onto a fixed model of agrarian mass production. Proslavery theorists such as George Fitzhugh saw the two systems as irreconcilable. "Laissez faire," he argued, was "at war with all kinds of slavery, for they in fact assert that individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least." Such testimonies complicate Beckert's interpretation of slavery as a fundamentally capitalistic institution.

Beckert's book, a sweeping 1,300-page history, synthesizes bits and pieces of the academic literature to recount the emergence of capitalism over the last millennium, tracing it from the port cities of Yemen in the Middle Ages to the global economy of today. But that literature is uneven and selectively curated. Standard works on the "Great Enrichment"—the sustained worldwide explosion in wealth and living standards over the last two centuries—receive scant mention. Despite the centrality of slavery to Beckert's narrative, he relegates the vast body of empirical analysis on this question to a single footnoted reference to an unremarkable synopsis by another author.

Instead, Beckert mixes a peculiar amalgam of anticapitalist authors. Some are familiar. Beckert treats Karl Marx's writings as an obvious diagnostic manual for how capitalism operates, complaining only that their 19th century milieu and Eurocentric focus precluded a more universal application. He has similar affinities for Karl Polanyi, calling the socialist writer "one of the twentieth century's most perceptive observers of capitalism" while evincing little awareness of the withering empirical criticism that Polanyi's 1944 manifesto, The Great Transformation, has attracted. When Beckert draws from economists, they are almost invariably from the fringes of the profession. He credulously repeats the inequality theories of Thomas Piketty, for example, showing no familiarity with the critiques of their shaky empirical footing or the heavy contestation around Piketty's "laws" of capital stock concentration.

The core of the book's themes and general style comes from a more obscure source: the German Historical School of Gustav von Schmoller and Werner Sombart. Beckert's new study bears more than passing resemblance to Sombart's Der Moderne Kapitalismus, a huge untranslated work published in successive volumes from 1902 through 1927. There are differences and updates. Whereas Sombart adopted a Eurocentric framework, Beckert's approach emphasizes the role of capitalism in the "Global South" of postcolonial studies. Yet both works purport to trace capitalism through distinctive historical "stages" of development. Here capitalism functions not so much as a system of exchange but as a tumultuous, violent "process" that organizes all economic life around the "ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital." Beckert presents his product as a global extrapolation on the Historical School's approach, but its message is ultimately a sustained derogation of capitalism and the academic discipline that he sees as doing the capitalists' bidding: mainstream economics.

The source of Beckert's grievance goes back to the marginal revolution of 1871, when William S. Jevons and Carl Menger developed near-simultaneous solutions to the longstanding problem of value in economic theory. Earlier classical economists theorized that the value of a good is instilled by the labor performed to improve upon it. This simple intuition breaks down in practice, as Smith noticed when looking at cases where the circumstance of a transaction caused differences in how goods were priced. The marginalists deduced that value is a function of individual subjective preferences, as exercised at the moment of a transaction by the parties to an exchange. This created a stumbling block for Marxist economics, which relied on the labor theory of value to calculate the "surplus value" that capital owners allegedly appropriate from their labor force without fair compensation. It also sparked a methodological feud between Menger and Schmoller, who attacked the marginalist approach as overly abstract and deductive.

Beckert unintentionally reveals that he does not grasp the logic of marginalism. He interprets subjective value theory as a crude attempt to "quantify the pleasure that goods provided for consumers," which he deems "ahistorical" and blames for "shift[ing] the primary question of economics" from labor-centric production "to the problem of how scarce resources should be allocated." In a few ambiguous steps, Beckert migrates to the 1960s writings of the post-Keynesian economist Piero Sraffa, who attempted to construct a theory of value from labor and commodity inputs that claimed to resuscitate this older approach, sans marginalism. Few mainstream economists cared, finding Sraffa's approach tendentious and empirically irrelevant. Beckert nonetheless proceeds as if the marginal revolution failed at its objectives, or at least warrants discarding today on the grounds that it allegedly ignores "history, power, culture, and even ethics" in favor of claimed universal laws of economic rationality.

For all his complaints, it is Beckert who whiffs on the historical context of this debate. Ignoring price theory, or perhaps not understanding its complexity, he scoffs that the heirs of marginalism "were all utopian thinkers with an almost religious belief in markets." His attempted history of economic thought omits the fact that an observed breakdown in the labor theory of value (David Ricardo, for example, noticed that wine pricing defied an aggregation of its labor components) precipitated this new approach. He glosses past marginalist critiques of the German Historical School's lack of evidentiary rigor. And as his treatment of slavery shows, Beckert appears unaware of mainstream economic scholarship on the very topics he claims as a historical specialization. 

Ultimately, Beckert's grievance comes down to politics. He believes that marginalism's triumph imposed an "intellectual enclosure" that "divorced economics from other social science disciplines." Conveniently, those other disciplines tend to display greater normative alignment with Beckert's own beliefs about inequality, labor, and class conflict.

These methodological complaints culminate in a lengthy treatment of "neoliberalism," the supposed pinnacle of this "intellectual enclosure" from the mid–20th century to the present. Here Beckert adopts the ideologically loaded frameworks of scholars who view "neoliberalism" as a cohesive project to wall off the capitalist economy from "democratic" will, by which they invariably mean a socialist model of economic redistribution.

Beckert's account repeats many common errors of this genre. He depicts 20th century trade liberalization as the quintessential neoliberal project, ignoring that its main institutional faces, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and later the World Trade Organization, grew out of the New Deal. While characterizing the "neoliberal" postwar economy as an institutional veneer for coercive economic violence, he almost entirely neglects its historical context amid a geopolitical struggle with the Soviet Union's coercive applications of Marxist doctrine. And in a final twist, Beckert cannot resist impugning capitalism with another form of violence. "Fascism never broke with a fundamentally capitalist organization of economic life," he contends, citing its alleged entrancement with the "commodification of inputs, outputs, and labor" and, above all, private property.

These features transmitted into "neoliberalism" after the war, he argues, because of the "absolute primacy of securing the workings of the price mechanism" in its doctrines. This produces a high "neoliberal" tolerance for authoritarianism, even "admiration for fascism"—a point he attempts to sustain with an out-of-context quotation by Ludwig von Mises in 1927 that credited interwar fascist governments for halting Marxist political violence.

Compare that with Beckert's assessments of Sombart, whom he praises as "incisive" and visionary. Beckert omits the final turn in Sombart's career. In 1934, this student of Schmoller, former correspondent of Friedrich Engels, and prophet of capitalism's evolutionary procession would forever discredit the reputation of the German Historical School by linking it to the Third Reich. Sombart's Deutscher Sozialismus demarcated this moment as an "age of late capitalism, which at the same time is early Socialism" and prophesied the rise of a new socialist economic order rooted in a Germanic "Volksgeist."

It is not in the myth of a Smithian Barbados where we find the historical value of capitalism. It is the terrifying alternatives that emerge when voluntary exchange is supplanted by an illiberal convergence between the socialist left and nationalist right."

Related posts:

*Capitalism: A Global History*, by Sven Beckert (By Tyler Cowen) (2025)

Slavery Did Not Make America Rich: Ingenuity, not capital accumulation or exploitation, made cotton a little king (By Deirdre Nansen McCloskey) (2018)

Jacob Levy Review's Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton (2016) 

The Case for Retracting Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project Essay (By Phillip W. Magness) (2020) 

Mass Incarceration and Mass Crime

By Alex Tabarrok.

"In our Marginal Revolution Podcast on Crime in the 1970s, I pointed out that blacks were often strongly in favor of tough on crime laws:

Tabarrok:  [P]eople think that mass incarceration is a peculiarly American phenomena, or that it came out of nowhere, or was due solely to racism. Michelle Alexander’s, The New Jim Crow, takes this view.

…[But] back then, the criminal justice system was also called racist, but the racism that people were pointing to was that black criminals were let back on the streets to terrorize black victims, and that black criminals were given sentences which were too light. That was the criticism back then. It was black and white victims together who drove the punishment of criminals. I think this actually tells you about two falsehoods. First, the primary driver of mass imprisonment was not racism. It was violent crime.

Second, this also puts the lie, sometimes you hear from conservatives, to this idea that black leaders don’t care about black-on-black crime. That’s a lie. Many Black leaders have been, and were, and are tough on crime. Now, it’s true, as crime began to fall in the 1990s, many blacks and whites began to have misgivings about mass incarceration. Crime was a huge problem in the 1970s and 1980s, and it hit the United States like a brick. It seemed to come out of nowhere. You can’t blame people for seeking solutions, even if the solutions come with their own problems.

A new paper The Racial Politics of Mass Incarceration by Clegg and Usmani offer more evidence challenging the now conventional Michelle Alexander view:

Public opinion data show that not just the white but also the black public became more punitive after the 1960s. Voting data from the House show that most black politicians voted punitively at the height of concern about crime. In addition, an analysis of federally mandated redistricting suggests that in the early 1990s, black political representation had a punitive impact at the state level. Together, our evidence suggests that crime had a profound effect on black politics. It also casts some doubt on the conventional view of the origins of mass incarceration.

As the authors note, the fact that blacks supported tough-on-crime laws doesn’t mean racism was absent. Racial overtones surely influenced the specific ways fear of crime was translated into policy. But the primary driver of mass incarceration wasn’t racism—it was mass crime."

‘The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery’ Review: Chains Forged Long Ago

The roots of American slavery precede early modern European thought and extend back to Greece and Rome.

By Mark G. Spencer. He is a professor of history at Brock University. He reviewed the book “The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery” by John Samuel Harpham. Excerpts:

"He submits that American justifications of slavery rested on ideas that were in place long before slavery’s expansion in 19th-century America—before the American Founding or even the establishment of the English Atlantic world."

"The ancients provided two foundational conceptions of slavery. Aristotle thought slavery a natural condition for some—a slave, he says, is “he who can be, and therefore is, another’s.” But Aristotle’s view was supplanted by that of others who, like the Roman emperor Justinian (A.D. 482-565), a Christian, considered slavery “contrary to the law of nature” because “all men were initially born free.” Even under Justinian law, though, a slave was property, and if freedom was a natural state, it wasn’t necessarily a permanent one. Accidents and misfortunes, especially being captured in wartime, could lead to enslavement. Slavery was considered a morally justified alternative to death."

"This “Roman tradition of slavery” was codified in Justinian’s “Corpus Juris Civilis”(ca. 530), a collection of texts that provided a lens through which early modern writers considered slavery and its consequences."

"John Locke further restricted the lawful sources of slavery, arguing, says Mr. Harpham, that “all persons were by nature born free and equal with respect to each other” and that “no person could consent to be enslaved.”"

"many of the peoples of Africa held slaves and were prepared to trade them.” When the English looked to Africa, they now “wanted to know by what means persons were enslaved there and whether this was done in a manner that one could come to accept.” In other words, whether it fit within the Roman tradition of slavery that they understood."

"t is “possible to describe the intellectual origins of American slavery almost without reference to skin color.”"

"“ideas about slavery permeated early-modern English culture,”" 

"the development of American slavery was not “a simple function of material interests.”" 

Race and economic well-being in the United States

From Tyler Cowen.

"We construct a measure of consumption-equivalent welfare for Black and White Americans, which incorporates life expectancy, consumption, leisure, and inequality. Based on these factors, welfare for Black Americans was 40 percent of that for White Americans in 1984 and 59 percent by 2022. There has been remarkable progress for Black Americans: The level of their consumption-equivalent welfare increased by a factor of 3.5 over the last 38 years when aggregate consumption per person only doubled. Despite this progress, the welfare gap in 2022 remains disconcertingly large at 41 percent, much larger than the 16 percent gap in consumption per person.

That is from a new article by Jean-Félix Brouillette, Charles I. Jones, and Peter J. Klenow, just published in American Economic Journal: Insights."

It states that black "consumption-equivalent welfare increased by a factor of 3.5 over the last 38 year." It also states that it "40 percent of that for White Americans in 1984." 

So then I will assume that blacks in 1984 had a score of 40 and whites had a score of 100. But it is now (in 2022) 3.5 times higher for blacks. That would give them a score of 140, which is 40% higher than what whites had in 1984. That sounds pretty good because I have never heard anyone say that whites were suffering terribly in 1984. 

 

Land ownership has NOT produced racial hierarchy, gender inequity, underdevelopment and environmental degradation

See ‘Land Power’ and ‘The Land Trap’: The Human Story Has Many Plots: Struggles over who can own land and its wealth have driven wars and changed societies by Edward Glaeser. Excerpts:

"Mr. Albertus also argues that the struggle over land ownership has produced “racial hierarchy, gender inequity, underdevelopment and environmental degradation.” Maybe. The conquest of the Americas and the use of enslaved labor for farming was indeed catastrophic for Africans and Native Americans, but Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho were the first four states to give women the vote. Farming the Amazon is still producing “environmental destruction on a massive scale” but, as Mr. Bird’s chapter on Singapore reminds us, development can soar without land as long as there are strong property rights and accessible, excellent schools."

"But even if we accept Mr. Albertus’s view that “our lives today are determined by the choices that were made when the land shifted hands” over the past two centuries, it does not follow that shifting land around is more effective an antipoverty tool than, say, investing in education or urban sanitation. Mr. Albertus’s own work, cited by Mr. Bird, finds that “land reform actually lowered levels of human capital accumulation” in Peru and that “under certain conditions it also has the potential to stunt urbanization, wealth accumulation, and ultimately education by encouraging land reform beneficiaries to remain in the countryside and employ their children on the farm rather than migrating to urban areas where opportunities for upward mobility are greater.”" 

"Missing from both books is a serious discussion about the connection between property rights and the value and use of land. The powers of a landowner can range from the almost full sovereignty enjoyed by a mighty feudal noble to the essentially nonexistent rights I have over the protected swampland outside my window. Over the past 60 years, the nature of land ownership in the U.S. has changed because land-use regulations have increasingly limited the right to build. In 1763, William Pitt the Elder trumpeted the rights of the small English landholder: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail—its roof may shake—the wind may blow through it—the storm may enter—the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter—all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.” That proud sentiment, linking freedom with land, feels increasingly untrue." 

Bulldozing Race Conscious Road Work

An overdue overhaul of federal preferences for ‘disadvantaged’ firms

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"Last year a federal judge in Kentucky said this is unconstitutional. “A contract business owned by man from Pakistan receives the rebuttable presumption,” he wrote. At the same time, a business owned by “a man from Afghanistan does not. Why?”

Well, the government sees Pakistani-Americans as Asian, while it deems Afghan-Americans to be white. By the way, the DBE category for “Hispanic” contractors also included those of “Portuguese culture.” These arbitrary government preferences for giving out taxpayer money cannot stand legal scrutiny, and the sums aren’t trivial. In 2021 there were 34,000 contracts committed to DBEs, according to data from the Transportation Department (DOT), and the federal share was $6 billion."

"This summer five Michigan men pleaded guilty to federal charges in a case involving a surveying firm that allegedly falsely obtained DBE status. Prosecutors said the company had a 20% partner who’s a Pacific Islander, and the men pretended he’d attained majority ownership and managerial control."

"“DBE fraud is pervasive,” said a 2020 article in a journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers."

"The DBE program raises construction costs, creates a make-work certification system that’s an obvious fraud target, and steers government money based on a contractor’s personal identity claims instead of whether he’s the best choice to do quality work for the taxpayer." 

Racial Gerrymandering Is a Bad Idea Whose Time Has Gone

The Supreme Court takes up segregated political maps, a temporary remedy that has lingered on

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"In 1940, 87% of blacks lived below the poverty line. In 2023 it was less than 18%, and the poverty rate for black married couples was 6.5%."

"According to 2020 census data, there are more than nine million black people with incomes above the white median."

"Liberals insist that every provision of the Voting Rights Act is as necessary today as it was six decades ago. But times have changed for the better, thankfully, and the real reason that liberals oppose modernizing the statute has nothing to do with protecting the black franchise, which was the original intent of the law. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), “the Voting Rights Act of 1965 employed extraordinary measures to address an extraordinary problem.” Unfortunately, today’s Democrats won’t acknowledge that it’s no longer 1965."

"Citing data on black voting patterns in recent decades, the court concluded that the formula, which hadn’t been updated since 1972, was outdated. Liberals derided the ruling and accused the court of “gutting” the Voting Rights Act. But the positive black voting trends cited by Chief Justice Roberts have persisted. An empirical analysis of black voter participation since the decision by economist Kyle Raze found that “the removal of preclearance requirements did not significantly reduce the relative turnout or registration of eligible Black voters. If anything, Black turnout may have increased relative to white turnout in covered jurisdictions after Shelby.”"

"In 1964, a year before the Voting Rights Act passed, black voter registration in Mississippi was less than 7%, the lowest in the region. Two years later, it was nearly 60%. Black voter registration in the South today is higher than it is in other parts of the country, and black voter registration nationwide has been rising for the past three decades."

"black voter turnout peaked with the elections of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, when it exceeded the white turnout rate. In 2016 it receded somewhat, but only to the pre-Obama norm. In 2020 black turnout was the third highest on record, behind 2008 and 2012. It declined in 2024, but so did turnout for whites and Hispanics." 

The British War on Slavery

By Alex Tabarrok.

"In August of 1833 the British passed legislation abolishing slavery within the British Empire and putting more than 800,000 enslaved Africans on the path to freedom. To make this possible, the British government paid a huge sum, £20 million or about 5% of GDP at the time, to compensate/bribe the slaveowners into accepting the deal. In inflation adjusted terms this is about £2.5 billion today (2025) but relative to GDP the British spent an equivalent of about $170 billion to free the slaves, a very large expenditure.

Indeed, the expenditure was so large that the money was borrowed and the final payments on the debt were not made until 2015. When in 2015 a tweet from the British Treasury revealed this surprising fact, there was a paroxysm of outrage as if slaveholders were still being paid off. I see the compensation in much more positive terms.

Of course, in an ideal world, compensation would have been paid to the slaves, not the slaveowners. Every man has a property in his own person and it was the slaves who had had their property stolen. In an ideal world, however, slavery would never have happened. Thus, the question the British abolitionists faced is not what happens in an ideal world but how do we get from where we are to a better world? Compensating the slaveowners was the only practical and peaceful way to get to a better world. As the great abolitionist William Wilberforce said on his deathbed “Thank God that I should have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the abolition of slavery!”

The 1833 Slavery Abolition Act was preceded by the 1807 Slave Trade Act which had banned trade in slaves. In an excellent new paper, The long campaign: Britain’s fight to end the slave trade, economist historians Yi Jie Gwee and Hui Ren Tan assemble new archival data to assess how the Royal Navy’s anti slave-trade patrols expanded over time, how effective they were at curtailing the trade, the influence of supply-side enforcement versus demand-side changes on ending the trade, and why Britain persisted with this costly campaign.

Britain’s naval suppression campaign began on a modest scale but the campaign grew in strength throughout the 19th century, peaking in the late 1840s to early 1850s when over 14% of the entire Royal Navy fleet was deployed to anti-slavery patrols. The British patrols captured some 1,600 ships and freed some 150,000 people destined for slavery but they were at best only modestly successful at reducing the slave trade. The big impact came when Brazil, the largest remaining market for enslaved labor (by the mid-19th century, nearly 80% of trans-Atlantic slave voyages sailed under Brazilian or Portuguese flags), enacted its anti slave-trade law in 1850. Britain’s campaign was not without influence on the demand side however as passage of the Aberdeen Act in 1845 allowed the Royal Navy to seize Brazilian slave ships and that put pressure on Brazil and helped spur the 1850 law.

The suppression patrols were expensive (consuming ships, men, and funds), and Britain derived no direct economic benefit from them. Yet, even during the Napoleonic Wars, the Opium Wars, and the Crimean War, the Royal Navy continued to station ships, even high-tech steam ships, off West Africa to catch slavers. Due to the expense, the patrols were controversial and there were attempts to end them. Gwee and Tan look at the votes on ending the patrols and find that ideology was the dominant factor explaining support for the patrols, that is a principled opposition to the slave trade and a belief in the moral cause of abolition kept Britain in the war against slavery even at considerable expense.

Ordinarily, I teach politics without romance and look for interest as an explanation of political action and while I don’t doubt that doing good and doing well were correlated, even during abolition, I also agree with Gwee and Tan that the British war on slavery was primarily driven by ideology and moral principle as both the compensation plan and the support of the anti-slavery patrols attest.

British taxpayers shouldered an enormous military and financial burden to eliminate slavery, reflecting a generosity of spirit and a sincere attempt to address a moral wrong—an act of atonement that stands as one of the most unusual and significant in history."