Leading Issues in Black Political Economy brings together the foremost experts on issues ranging from employment, training, and education of African Americans. It also emphasizes macro-economic concerns of business development with special emphasis on long-term trends of black-owned businesses. The work emphasizes welfare considerations in an anti-welfare epoch, and the role of affirmative action now that it is under attack. Attention is given to the role of race in the continuing disparity of income distribution in American society. The highlights of Leading Issues include "An Employment and Business Strategy for the Next Century: A Comment," by Thomas D. Boston; "Long Term Trends and Prospects for Black-owned Business," by Andrew F. Brimmer; "Is the U.S. Small Business Administration a Racist Institution?" by Timothy Bates; "Worker Re-Training and Labor Market Outcomes: A New Focus for Labor Research," by James B. Stewart; "Race, Cognitive Skills, Psychological Capital, and Wages," by Arthur H. Goldsmith, William Darity, Jr., and Jonathan R. Veum; and "Reparations and Public Policy," by Richard F. America. The overall findings suggest that empirical wage equation specifications do matter. The role of psychological capital is critical in the marketplace. Race is indeed an important determinant of wages-especially when the influence of both cognitive skills and psychological capital are included in the wage equation. This volume will be of crucial interest to economists, political scientists, sociologists, and policy analysts studying African-American life. Thomas D. Boston is editor of the Review of Black Political Economy and professor of economics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the co-editor, with Catherine L. Ross, of The Inner City: Urban Poverty and Economic Development in the Next Century, also available from Transaction.

The central theme of the book is that black Americans are fundamentally no different from any other people. Indeed, their history reflects a pattern of economic development which is quite consistent with the changing social-economic fortunes of all peoples throughout human history. Moreover, during the last five and a half centuries those people who are now identified as black Americans have played a most decisive role in the origins of capitalism as well as the rate and geographic extent of its development in the world. The dominant factor in their history to date has been the exploitation of their labors by an alien people under three distinct historical modes of social-economic organization--slavery, sharecropping, and wage laboring. During the interval of real time during which blacks experienced each of these three historical epochs, members of the general American working class were exploited under a different form of political economy. Thus, it has come to appear that there is some inherent "racial" character which sets black Americans apart from non-black workers in the American social setting.

An updated edition of Manning Marable's classic--considered one of the best studies of race and class.