June 24, 2015
Michael Fletcher had a short piece highlighting the huge gulf in the economic status of whites and African Americans. While the piece rightly points out that there are no simple remedies to eliminate the gap, one of the charts suggests a policy that can make a huge difference.
The chart shows the overall unemployment rate and the unemployment rate for whites and African Americans. The unemployment rate for African Americans is consistently twice as high as the unemployment rate for whites. This means that a drop in the unemployment rate for whites of one percentage point would likely be associated with a drop of two percentage points in the unemployment rate for African Americans.
For African American teens the ratio is typically six to one. This means that a Federal Reserve Board policy of letting the unemployment rate fall as low as possible is likely to have large payoffs for African Americans, especially for young people trying to get a step up in the labor market. This may not eliminate the gap in status between whites and African Americans, but a commitment to a full employment policy may go a substantial distance in that direction.
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