are thrown out of work in this period, and when people struggle generally and especially when men struggle and economically insecure and out of work, they don t marry. and men and women do have children, but they don t marry when they are economically insecure. and what happens as a result is that children they have often struggle when as is usually the case their parents don t stay together. so, when you have families marked by economic insecurity, and when you have communities marked by economic insecurity, you see the character of those families and those communities changing, and you know, if unemployment is high enough for long enough in those sorts of places, the problem can actually become intergenerational which is what we saw in the 1970s in inner cities, and manufacturing suddenly left the inner cities in the 1970s and black men disproportionately fell out of
the dream. when i read that i thought, well, i don t know if we with can rebuild the dream, but we need to discover what the next one is, so what is your vision of that? well, first of all, i think that we need to be very clear that the last economy, the one that crashed had three problems wit. it was based on consumption rather than production and based on credit rather than thrift and smart savings like our grandparents and based on ecological construction rather than restoration. it will be more productive and conservation oriented and big components of green chunks of the economy where you are talking about energy, et cetera, and the problem is where we are now which is in the ditch to on the road of prosperity again, we have to have america s government to be a partner to the american people, and uf unfortunately washington, d.c. is trying to add more pain to the pain, by having the government go missing in action. in the country, traditionally those who have done well in americ
this is played out by race. for african-americans, unemployment rate above 15%. hispanics, above 11%. whites, under 9%. what is going on? what s the accounting for differences between the communities? typically we see unemployment rates double of that of white unemployment. the most shocking thing, the evaporation of wealth. not just an income gap which had been narrowing. not closed. narp owing. the wealth gap growing and growing exponentially in the past few years. the debt ratio in terms of what is of value, evaporated for blacks and latino especially for asian-american families. in this knt i think we have kind of a national fundamental psychological problem where when something good happens to us we think we caused it. when something bad happens to us we think it was the circumstances. right. when something bad laps to someone else we think that they caused it. and so we do this and then
in the golden era of the economy. and don peck, the book is called pinched and you should read it in the terrific article and you should read it. thank you, ezra. we have laid out the problem and it is dire, but it is time for solutions. stick around. [ male announcer ] this is coach parker. whose non-stop day starts with back pain. and a choice. take advil now and maybe up to four in a day.