Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Quoting myself from over at RuralVotes' The Field:

One thing is certain. As Tom W. points out, there is not much distinction between Obama and Clinton on policy, and the term movement is being used pretty loosely.

Neoconservative newspeak vs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's straight talk

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/25/6612/

Naomi Klein at the annual conference for the American Sociological Association broadcast by Democracy Now:

We either value African life, understand a black life as equal to a white life and the poor as equally deserving as the wealthy – or we do not.

Read Mukoma Ngugi's article which makes clear the reasons radical change is needed for the people of Africa (even more than most of the world), and why this is the appropriate spot:

A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics (2004)
http://www.paecon.net/guidecontents.htm

Need for other visions beyond neoclassical.

Including a chapter by Richard Wolf.

From the chapter list it is mostly about what's wrong and the need for alternatives, but as it looks to be written by people who are studying and creating fuller, more useful, and more human models, I'm sure a lot of that gets in.

A 2005 article on hot young economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. by Stephen J. Dubner got me thinking about my thesis again.

About all I need to know to want to keep track of his work is that his model is W.E.B. DuBois.

But this statement is disturbing, and the author is an economist himself. Following up on examples of Fryer's willingness and capacity to look at all things that might affect black achievement, including genetics, Dubner wrote:

So here is Fryer's final anomaly: he is a man who revels in his blackness and yet also says he believes, as DuBois believed, that black underachievement cannot entirely be laid at the feet of discrimination.

What sort of fool, let alone a self-described rogue economist, would frame the question as a matter of discrimination? Kidnapping and slavery and no compensation hardly fit neatly under discrimination. Follow history a tad longer and you get to sharecropping, which puts the problem squarely in an economic context.

Make wealth and resources equal, and I bet black people will overcome racism – with great difficulty, but ultimately overcome it – and achieve just about anything professors and bureaucrats care to measure.