The American Dual Economy: Race, Globalization, and the Politics of Exclusion

Peter Temin ()
Additional contact information
Peter Temin: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

No 26, Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking

Abstract: I describe the American economy in the twenty-first century as a dual economy in the spirit of W. Arthur Lewis. Similar to the subsistence and capitalist economies characterized by Lewis, I distinguish a low-wage sector and a FTE (Finance, Technology, and Electronics) sector. The transition from the low-wage to the FTE sector is through education, which is becoming increasingly difficult for members of the low-wage sector because the FTE sector has largely abandoned the American tradition of quality public schools and universities. Policy debates about public education and other policies that serve the low-wage sector often characterize members of the low-wage sector as black even though the low-wage sector is largely white. This model of a modern dual economy explains difficulties in many current policy debates, including education, healthcare, criminal justice, infrastructure and household debts.

Keywords: inequality; dual economy; race; education; criminal justice; Nixon; Reagan; political economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H53 J68 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 83 pages
Date: 2015-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe, nep-pr~, nep-iue and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/The-A ... ics-of-Exclusion.pdf (application/pdf)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2692634 First version, 2015 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:thk:wpaper:26

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2692634

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pia Malaney ().