{"id":1053,"date":"2008-07-10T23:24:49","date_gmt":"2008-07-11T03:24:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/10\/black-unemployment-the-effect-of-80-years-of-government-intervention\/"},"modified":"2022-03-24T10:37:13","modified_gmt":"2022-03-24T14:37:13","slug":"black-unemployment-the-effect-of-80-years-of-government-intervention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/10\/black-unemployment-the-effect-of-80-years-of-government-intervention\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Unemployment: the effect of 80 years of government intervention"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve started The Forgotten Man<\/a><\/em>, an economic history of the Great Depression.\u00a0 Much in the book was news to me.\u00a0 I’ll kick off my weblog coverage of this work with one quote:\u00a0 “Data from the 1930 census would show black unemployment nationally standing slightly below white unemployment.”\u00a0 (i.e., in 1930, among whose who wanted jobs, a greater percentage of black Americans held jobs than white Americans)<\/p>\n

After FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and all of the other Big Government efforts over the past 80 years to fight inner city poverty and discrimination against blacks…\u00a0 the black unemployment rate is roughly double the white unemployment rate.\u00a0 During the same period, the Federal Government share of the economy, as a percentage of GDP, has grown from roughly 2 percent to roughly 20 percent.<\/p>\n

[http:\/\/www.bls.gov\/opub\/cwc\/cm20030124ar03p1.htm <\/a>offers some historical unemployment data.\u00a0 In 1930, the year under discussion, the\u00a0rate was 8.9 percent.\u00a0 During the Calvin Coolidge years (1920s), the rate was 3.3 percent.\u00a0 Note that these numbers would be much lower given modern measurement techniques that exclude large numbers of potential workers from the labor force.\u00a0 The ballooning of the unemployed during the Great Depression was an anomaly that will be discussed in a future post about the rest of the Forgotten Man<\/em>.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve started The Forgotten Man, an economic history of the Great Depression.\u00a0 Much in the book was news to me.\u00a0 I’ll kick off my weblog coverage of this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBlack Unemployment: the effect of 80 years of government intervention - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/10\/black-unemployment-the-effect-of-80-years-of-government-intervention\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Black Unemployment: the effect of 80 years of government intervention - 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