Unemployment is higher in Europe than in the United States and primarily concentrated in immigrant minority populations, so people are worried about what's going to happen and if American-style ghettos are emerging in Europe. There are some of the problems there that America sees associated with the lack of economic inclusion - family breakdown, gang behavior, and racial tensions. I get the sense that in Europe they are much more concerned about these issues than in the United States.

I maintain that the period during the first half of the 1990s, the period in which rising inequality reached its peak, was a period in which we came very, very close to a demagogic immobilization of racism in this society.

A lot of joblessness in the black community doesn't seem to be reachable through fiscal and monetary policies. People have not been drawn into the labor market even during periods of economic recovery. Employers would rather not hire a lot of workers from the inner city. They feel people from the inner city are not job-ready, that the kids have been poorly educated, that they can't read, they can't write, they can't speak.

Unemployment is higher in Europe than in the United States and primarily concentrated in immigrant minority populations, so people are worried about what's going to happen and if American-style ghettos are emerging in Europe. There are some of the problems there that America sees associated with the lack of economic inclusion - family breakdown, gang behavior, and racial tensions. I get the sense that in Europe they are much more concerned about these issues than in the United States.

If we could create the conditions that make racism difficult, or discourage it, then there would be less stress and less need for affirmative action programs. One of those conditions would be an economic policy that would create tight labor markets over long periods of time. Now does that mean that affirmative action is here only temporarily? I think the ultimate goal should be to remove it.

Crime, family dissolution, welfare, and low levels of social organization are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.

During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.