Equality, Incentives, and Economic Policy
分析美国联邦教育政策（鼓励人力资本投资）与经济政策（实现充分就业）如何相互作用，影响白人与黑人之间的收入不平等。研究发现，充分就业环境能提升人力资本投资的回报，从而更有效地改善黑人职业分布、减少贫困和收入差距。
The future reduction of income inequality between whites and blacks in the United States is affected by the interaction of federal educational policy to encourage human capital investment and federal economic policy to achieve full employment and stable prices. The effect of a fullemployment economy on income disparity between blacks and whites is limited by the occupational distribution of the black labor force. However, human capital investment to upgrade the occupational distribution of the black labor force is more effective within a full-employment setting which assures a higher rate of return on investment than in a setting of persistent high unemployment. Thus from the point of view of blacks, the scenario for the best of all possible worlds is one in which economic policy strives actively to achieve full employment while educational policy stimulates the growth of human capital investment to upgrade the occupational distribution of the black labor force. No one policy without the other can be fully successful in reducing persistent income disparity. There is a general concensus that a fullemployment economy is particularly beneficial for blacks, since a tighter labor market will increase black income and reduce black unemployment rates by a greater proportion than that of whites. The net result is a reduction of black poverty and some improvement in the distribution of income. The relationship between poverty and unemployment in the 1960's is particularly striking in Table 1. Between 1964 and 1969 when black unemployment rates fell from 9.6 to 6.4 percent, the percentage of black families in poverty fell sharply from 40 percent to approximately 28 percent. This percentage appears to be some kind of a floor below which it has rarely fallen throughout the 1970-77 period, as the unemployment rate grew to over 13 percent. Needless to say, a proliferation of public welfare programs and the initial impact of the civil rights laws also played an important role in reducing poverty in the 1960's. In fact, it may be argued that expanded welfare programs combined with changes in the personal income tax structure helped to offset some of the negative income effects of rising black unemployment in the 1970's. The difference in the behavior of the income disparity between blacks and whites (as measured by the ratio of the median family incomes of the two groups) in the 1960's and the 1970's is also readily observed in Table 1. Declining unemployment rates for blacks in the 1960's were accompanied by an identifiable improvement in the black-white median family income ratio, from .54 in 1964 to .61 in 1969. But in the 1970's, the improvement did not continue; instead, there appears to be a general hardening of the median income gap into a permanence around a ratio of approximately .60. The proximate cause of this persistent income disparity between blacks and whites and among blacks is reflected in the dominance of low-productivity workers in the occupational distribution of the black labor force. In 1974, for example, the share of service workers in the total employed black labor force was 26.2 percent, compared to 11.8 percent for the employed white labor *Professor of economics, Howard University. I wish to thank Surinder Gujral, Reynold Madoo, and Margaret Simms for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.