African-Americans' economic gains have always depended on the jobs and wages available to them. With greater global competition and new technology in the 1970s and 1980s, the structure of job opportunities changed. That change undoubtedly made black gains more difficult. Americans with high-level skills profited more than the less educated from the new structure. Globalization sped up deindustrialization, destroying a main source of black (male) upward mobility. And the new high-wage jobs in services and manufacturing required more education and more technical education than most blacks had.

Is this explanation for the decline of black fortunes since the mid-1970s supported by the evidence on job and wage changes? Only partly. Heightened global competition and the information revolution in the 1970s and 1980s do not by themselves explain why the private sector responded to these new economic forces the way it did, or why the relative incomes of lower-end jobs fell more rapidly than those at the higher end. Nor do they explain why the pattern was accentuated for minorities.

To complete the picture, we need to look at the response by the other major player in the job market – government. Government income policies, which had remained the same for almost two generations, also changed after 1973. These radically new policies had a role in shaping wage patterns.