Posted on 11/15/2005 2:49:09 AM PST by RWR8189
Many people are blaming the riots in France on the high unemployment rate among young Muslim men living in the ghettoes around Paris and elsewhere. Some are blaming both the unemployment and the ghettoization on discrimination by the French.
Plausible as these explanations may sound, they ignore economics, among other things.
Let us go back a few generations in the United States. We need not speculate about racial discrimination because it was openly spelled out in laws in the Southern states, where most blacks lived, and was not unknown in the North.
Yet in the late 1940s, the unemployment rate among young black men was not only far lower than it is today but was not very different from unemployment rates among young whites the same ages. Every census from 1890 through 1930 showed labor force participation rates for blacks to be as high as, or higher than, labor force participation rates among whites.
Why are things so different today in the United States -- and so different among Muslim young men in France? That is where economics comes in.
People who are less in demand -- whether because of inexperience, lower skills, or race -- are just as employable at lower pay rates as people who are in high demand are at higher pay rates. That is why blacks were just as able to find jobs as whites were, prior to the decade of the 1930s and why a serious gap in unemployment between black teenagers and white teenagers opened up only after 1950.
Prior to the decade of the 1930s, the wages of inexperienced and unskilled labor were determined by supply and demand. There was no federal minimum wage law and labor unions did not usually organize inexperienced and unskilled workers. That is why such workers were able to find jobs, just like everyone else, even when these were black workers in an era of open discrimination.
The first federal minimum wage law, the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, was passed in part explicitly to prevent black construction workers from "taking jobs" from white construction workers by working for lower wages. It was not meant to protect black workers from "exploitation" but to protect white workers from competition.
Even aside from a racial context, minimum wage laws in countries around the world protect higher-paid workers from the competition of lower paid workers.
Often the higher-paid workers are older, more experienced, more skilled or more unionized. But many goods and services can be produced with either many lower skilled workers or fewer higher skilled workers, as well as with more capital and less labor or vice-versa. Employers' choices depend on the relative costs.
The net economic effect of minimum wage laws is to make less skilled, less experienced, or otherwise less desired workers more expensive -- thereby pricing many of them out of jobs. Large disparities in unemployment rates between the young and the mature, the skilled and the unskilled, and between different racial groups have been common consequences of minimum wage laws.
That is their effect whether the particular minimum wage law applies to one sector of the economy like the Davis-Bacon Act, to the whole economy like the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 or to particular local communities like so-called "living wage" laws and policies today.
The full effect of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was postponed by the wartime inflation of the 1940s, which raised wages above the level specified in the Act. Amendments to raise the minimum wage began in 1950 -- and so did the widening racial differential in unemployment, especially for young black men.
Where minimum wage rates are higher and accompanied by other worker benefits mandated by government to be paid by employers, as in France, unemployment rates are higher and differences in unemployment rates between the young and the mature, or between different racial or ethnic groups, are greater.
France's unemployment rate is roughly double that of the United States and people who are unemployed stay unemployed much longer in France. Unemployment rates among young Frenchmen are about 20 percent and among young Muslim men about 40 percent.
There is no free lunch, least of all for the disadvantaged.
Copyright 2005 Creators Syndicate
I think I mean correlation.
I understand correlation to mean that there's a relationship between the two but one cannot tell the direction of causation.
Correlation is not simply arithmetic overlap, that the total number of unemployed have some among them that are also wahabbist desecrators.
Now I'm confused. Underclass rioters in the U.S. (L.A., Cincinnati, etc.) are generally not Moslem. Underclass rioters in France at the moment are Moslem; however, France has had plenty of other incidents of violent agitation in recent years - "students," subsidized farmers and other government employees - that were not distinguished by religion.
This demonstrates, to me, that a large group of government-dependent citizens is prone to riot, irrespective of religion.
Aspects of Moslem culture such as anti-Jewish agitation and abuse of women seem to be largely independent of economics. On the other hand, the economically unproductive are more likely to be open to extremist religion than those who have better things to do with their time.
My basic point was that the situation is more complicated that simply "Moslems are animals!" You may disagree, of course, if you choose.
No, I don't think I disagree with you.
I'm fairly certain we'd find a correlation between wahabbist and desecration.
I'm not sure we'd find a correlation between wahabbist and rioting auto torcher, but I think we will.
We'd have to have a broad enough sample to measure at least these two groups: french muslim wahabbists and french muslim non-wahabbists.
Many frenchmen have been unemployed lately, too. The economy has been down for more than a few years. There were no riots and cars torched. Why riot and why now?
You could say the same thing about riots in the U.S.
The key point, in my opinion, is not simple unemployment, but the existence of a permanent government-dependent underclass.
The reports I'm hearing is that the rioters are muslim and are not young, unemployed frenchmen who are in a similar circumstance.
bumped for latuh
I don't know. I'm not following the story that closely, and you probably can't believe the news reports much, anyway.
However, in the United States, rioters are overwhelmingly non-Moslem American citizens ... distinguished by unemployment, welfare dependency, poor education, and high crime rates, rather than by religion.
When poor Catholics have faced in the past what the muslim immigrants face in France, they have resorted to some of those very same things. You don't understand the problem in France.
The muslims are in a bad way everywhere. That doesn't mean that France does not have a problem with its system or that the riots in France are not peculiar to that system. I don't see muslims burning cars where I live but I can remember blacks doing the same thing here and most of them probably considered themselves Christian.
Right. I didn't see many whites rioting in LA either therefore...what? I kind of lost track I'll have to get back to you later..
The man can dispense more knowledge in a short column than most college kids will learn in four years at a university.
When they are hired but not paid - as in Mississippi recently - we are most definitely exploiting them.
When we pay them lower wages then we would pay Americans but hire than they would receive in Mexico we are hurting American labor...because, quite often, they have more or less equal skills but far better attitudes.
As long as we have a minimum wage, illegal immigrant labor is going to be a problem and we will all pay higher prices for just about everything. That employers will violate the law to hire illegals shows that the minimum wage is too high. Supply and demand works. Artificial controls usually do not.
No, they do not work. But they do win elections, and that's the name of the game.
What a great idea! I wish it would happen.
So why aren't they (the poor Catholics) part of the present uprising?
ML/NJ
Because they are not at the bottom of the pile. Go to Paris and look around. It'd be hard to tell where the Catholics live but it is instantly obvious where the muslims live.
I can tell where the Muslims live in America, or in Israel, and it has nothing to do with their econimic status. It has to do with their culture. Same thing in Paris, and same thing with the on-going festivities there.
ML/NJ
It's not the same here. I don't know about Israel, and it's not all their fault in Paris. This muslim-hating stuff doesn't always explain everything.
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