My guest this week is the distinguished labor economist Harry Holzer. He and I met back in my Kennedy School days at Harvard, and since then he’s done a lot of impressive, ground-breaking work on low-wage labor. He served as the chief economist in the US Department of Labor under Bill Clinton, and he’s published an intimidating stack of books on labor, some of which deal with the racial dimension of the issue. I wanted to get away from politics and hand-waving for a bit and dig into the nitty gritty details with a guy who knows the research, and Harry is just the man for that.
Harry and I run down a set of interrelated issues that are holding many black boys and men back: K-12 education and vocational training, employment and apprenticeship, and incarceration. There are some issues that often go unmentioned in conversations like this, such as the way that child support enforcement can end up hindering rather than helping the children that it is meant to serve. Harry has a lot of ideas that sound sensible to me, especially in the employment realm. But I have to ask “the Chicago question”: If, for example, paid apprenticeships end up benefiting both employees and employers, as Harry says the research suggests, why aren’t more employers offering them? And finally, we do get down to politics. Harry doesn’t know why progressives are blind to the ways that their messaging and activism engender backlash against policies that could materially improve the communities those progressives claim to want to help.
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0:59 How Harry met Glenn
3:44 Black girls and women are doing relatively well. Why aren’t black boys and men?
11:21 Harry: Some of the barriers are structural, some are cultural
18:20 The crude toolkit for fixing child support
25:15 Black teachers, tutoring, and “high-quality career and tech ed”
31:44 In schools, one size doesn’t fit all
35:22 Three ways to improve employment prospects
39:10 Glenn asks “the Chicago question”
42:09 Discrimination against ex-convicts
50:38 Immigration’s impact on black employment
53:29 Are too many people in prison?
56:07 Harry: Progressives are oblivious to the backlash they generate
Recorded August 20, 2024
Links and Readings
Harry and Richard J. Freeman’s 1986 edited collection, The Black Youth Employment Crisis
Melissa Kearney’s book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind
Isabel V. Sawhill’s book, Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage
Douglas Harris’s book, Charter School City: What the End of Traditional Public Schools in New Orleans Means for American Education
Glenn’s paper with Young-Chul Kim, “Rebranding Ex-Convicts”
William Julius Wilson’s book, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions
Harry Holzer – What's Holding Back Black Boys & Men?