Since then, the employment figures don't tell the full story. If you only look at the wages of those who are still lucky to be in the labor market, you're going to miss all the preclusive effects associated with the passage of laws that make it costly for employers to hire. You're going to miss the higher unemployment rates for black men and women.
So I'm telling folks out on East 63rd Street, "Would you rather have a steady job at decent wages and hope for constant productivity gains? Or would you rather depend on the law to give you a boost that it cannot deliver and leave you without any kind of employment options?"
Reason: Does this have any implications for William Julius Wilson's theory that many of the problems in the inner city stem from the fact that middle-class blacks all moved out once housing segregation broke down?
Epstein: Part of it. What he does is document the greater polarization of the black community after the passage of civil rights legislation. Those who were doing very well do better, those who were doing very poorly do even worse.
Where I disagree--very vehemently--with Bill Wilson is on what kind of non-race-specific statutes or legislative measures you would want to change the overall situation. Bill is somebody who still believes that the New Deal charm has not yet lost its magic and you can find some massive government program for housing, or for education and so forth, which will do better for people than they would do for themselves. He's right to think that race-specific remedies will not have any desired effects. But he's wrong to think that comprehensive social tinkering or engineering will do any good either.
What you really ought to do is to reduce the total level of government burden, let people live where they choose, and it will turn out that, in general over time, the level of the housing stock will improve and the level of incomes will increase, just as they did in the period between 1946 and 1960-64. That was a relatively unregulated period in which you had the benefit of the post-war growth and of moderate levels of government intervention. It wasn't a free market. Nobody pretends that it was. But there was far less going on than there was once the Great Society started up.
Reason: Do you think one of the reasons big employers moved out of the inner city was because of the civil rights laws?
Epstein: It's hard to say, because employers will follow their labor force. But there's certainly no reason to stay around in the inner city if it turns out that hiring workers under these circumstances will expose you to all sorts of penalties if you try to upgrade the work force and to fire people who turn out not to do well. But it would be a terrible mistake to assume that's the only thing that's going on.
A lot of it has to do with a powerful effect that no civil rights law can cure: The returns to education and employment are much greater now than they were 30 years ago. And this is a non-race-based effect. The gap in earnings between people who have quantitative skills and people who don't have quantitative skills is greater today than it was 40 years ago.
What one could say is that while you cannot measure for certain the level of harm that the civil rights statutes have done, still you cannot think of any benign outcomes or explanations that make it appear as though, on balance, they've been a net positive--particularly if you take into account the possibility of abuse and the administrative costs associated even with their beneficent intentions.
Reason: Do you think there's a new consensus emerging that recognizes the unintended consequences of civil rights legislation?
Epstein: My sense about the civil rights stuff is that the case for enforcement is less enthusiastic now than it was five or 10 years ago. And it's not because people are taking what I've said to heart. It's because they see all the individual cases and they try to look for any systemic improvement and they just have a sense that things are not better than they were 30 years ago. So they basically have come up with a very pragmatic conclusion: "Well, it may have been a great idea but it's not working as well as we hoped." It's not that they are opposed to it, but they are less enthusiastic.
There is relatively little discussion about civil rights as such. Of course, there's more anxiety about affirmative-action programs. That debate is much more closely contested than it has been before. I am of two minds with respect to affirmative action. I may not think it the best thing in the world with respect to internal policies of individual firms or institutions, but I'm extraordinarily reluctant for the government to come in and say it's just a stupid idea, now what we ought to do is to prohibit it from taking place.
So my general libertarian instincts carry over to this question: If a private firm wants to have an affirmative-action program, then that's their business.
Reason: What about affirmative action with regards to schooling, where minority candidates whose grades and entrance exams may be below the average non-minority applicant are granted admission? What would be the appropriate approach, say, for a law school?
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