The Labor Market and Young Black Men: Updating Moynihan's Perspective

The Labor Market and Young Black Men: Updating Moynihan’s Perspective Harry J. Holzer Georgetown University The Urban Institute September 2007 This paper has been prepared for the conference on “The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades,” Harvard University, September 27-29, 2007. The paper is forthcoming in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2008. I. Introduction In his 1965 report on the status of black families in America, Daniel Patrick Moynihan referred to the employment situation of young black men as an “unconcealable crisis....the problem will now become steadily more serious.” He also identified this situation as a primary cause of the instability of black families that he documented in the report, and as a priority for any public policies that might seek to stabilize black families. How accurate was Moynihan’s prognosis of a steadily growing crisis in the employment of young black men? Was his analysis of the problem accurate, both in the mid-1960s and in subsequent decades? What additional factors that he did not foresee affect the employment outcomes of young black men? And what does all of this imply for public policy? In this paper I review Moynihan’s perspective on the employment problems of young black men in 1965, and what we have learned from empirical research on this topic since then. I begin in the next section by documenting Moynihan’s perspective, and then in subsequent parts of the paper I review more recent trends and empirical evidence on their causes. I conclude with some thoughts on what all of this implies for public policy. I argue that Moynihan’s views in 1965 were stunningly prescient, as the employment situation of young black men has steadily deteriorated since then. He correctly identified many of the causes of this problem, though some economic and social forces and trends were impossible to foresee at that time. The appropriate policy prescriptions today are thus somewhat broader than what he argued for at the time, though still fairly consistent with his overall views. II. Moynihan’s Perspective on Employment of Young Black Men Chapter III of the Moynihan report focuses on “The Roots of the Problem,” and in a subsection entitled “Unemployment and Poverty” he focuses on employment issues involving young black men. He continues this focus in Chapter IV (entitled “The Tangle of Pathology.”) Moynihan first documents the growing rate of black male unemployment (especially relative to white males) over the period 1930-1963. He notes that, despite the overall prosperity of the economy during the year 1963, “...29.2 percent of all Negro men in the labor force were unemployed at some time during the year. Almost half of these men were out of work 15 weeks or more.” While he focuses primarily on unemployment throughout the report, Moynihan later notes an additional trend of rising nonparticipation in the labor force among these men – an the emergence of a small gap in the participation rate of black men relative to white men (75.8 percent v. 78 percent in 1964). 1 Moynihan documents the extent to which black men were falling behind black women in the 1960s (and earlier) in educational attainment and occupational status. He notes that young black men were more likely to drop out of high school, less like to attend college, and less likely to enter white-collar occupations than young black women as of the 1960s.1 He also notes (though without much empirical documentation) a deteriorating knowledge of the world of work and of informal connections to the labor market, and especially to jobs in and training for the skilled crafts and other well-paying blue-collar jobs, among young men growing up in fatherless families. A rising trend in crime and “delinquency” among these young men receives a fair amount of attention as well. And, of course, he emphasizes a strong empirical correlation between trends in joblessness and other social indicators for black men, on the one hand, and the growth of female-headed families in the black community, on the other, throughout the report. Moynihan notes, of course, that educational attainment and occupational status were rising for the black community overall in the aftermath of the “Negro American Revolution” that culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But to what does he attribute the growing employment problems of young black men in America, especially among those who are not growing up in middle-class families? At various places in the report, Moynihan argues that “...jobs became more and more difficult to find...” (Chapter 3), and further that “discouragement about finding a job” have driven the downward trends in labor force participation among young black men (Chapter 4). But, in the middle of a great post-war boom, why should their abilities to find work have declined? At various places in the report Moy