There is no inherent reason why low-skill or high-risk employees are any less employable than high-skill, low-risk employees. Someone who is five times as valuable to an employer is no more or less employable than someone else who is one-fifth as valuable, when the pay differences reflect their differences in benefits to the employer. This is more than a theoretical point. Historically, lower skill levels did not prevent black males from having labor force participation rates higher than that of white males for every U.S. Census from 1890 through 1930. Since then, the general growth of wage fixing arrangements--minimum wage laws, labor unions, civil service pay scales, etc.--have reversed that and made more and more blacks "unemployable," despite their rising levels of education and skill, absolutely and relative to whites. In short, no one is employable or unemployable absolutely, but only relative to a given pay scale. Increasingly, blacks have been priced out of the market. This is particularly apparent among the least experienced blacks--that is, black teenagers, who have astronomical unemployment rates.
The alternative explanation of high black teenage unemployment by "racism" collides with two very hard facts: (1) black teenage unemployment in the 1940s and early 1950s was only a fraction of what it was in the 1960s and 1970s (and was no different from
white teenage unemployment during the earlier period), despite the obvious fact that there was certainly no
less racism in the earlier period, and (2) unemployment rates among blacks in their mid twenties drop sharply to a fraction of what it was in their teens, even though the workers have not changed color as they aged, but only become more experienced. The intentional explanation--"racism"--may be more moralistically satisfying, but the systemic explanation fits the facts.
--Thomas Sowell,
Knowledge and Decisions (New York: BasicBooks, 1996), 174-175.
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