The Political Economy of Hope and Fear: Capitalism and the Black Condition in America

This is an economist’s plea for unsentimental thinking on racial matters in the USA, to replace what he regards as a mixture of liberal hand-wringing and conservative myth-making about the nation’s racial predicament. Appeals to fairness and justice are bound to fail, he argues, since the economic foundations of the civil-rights movement have been destroyed by the combined forces of globalization, technology, and tight government budgets. The book presents an economic analysis of the links between competitive capitalism, racial hostility and persistent racial inequality in post-civil-rights America. It addresses the anger and frustration that blacks feel in the face of what they perceive as the nation’s abandonment of racial equality as a worthy objective, and sets out to show how the difficulties faced by blacks are related to fundamental changes in the economic fortunes of the US.