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The miscarriage of justice at Jena, La.—where five black high school students arrested for beating a white student were charged with attempted murder—and the resulting protest march tempts us to the view, expressed by several of the marchers, that not much has changed in traditional American racial relations. However, a remarkable series of high-profile incidents occurring elsewhere in the nation at about the same time, as well as the underlying reason for the demonstrations themselves, make it clear that the Jena case is hardly a throwback to the 1960s, but instead speaks to issues that are very much of our times.

What exactly attracted thousands of demonstrators to the small Louisiana town? While for some it was a simple case of righting a grievous local injustice, and for others an opportunity to relive the civil rights era, for most the real motive was a long overdue cry of outrage at the use of the prison system as a means of controlling young black men.

America has more than two million citizens behind bars, the highest absolute and per capita rate of incarceration in the world. Black Americans, a mere 13 percent of the population, constitute half of this country’s prisoners. A tenth of all black men between ages 20 and 35 are in jail or prison; blacks are incarcerated at over eight times the white rate.

The effect on black communities is catastrophic: one in three male African-Americans in their 30s now has a prison record, as do nearly two-thirds of all black male high school dropouts. These numbers and rates are incomparably greater than anything achieved at the height of the Jim Crow era. What’s odd is how long it has taken the African-American community to address in a forceful and thoughtful way this racially biased and utterly counterproductive situation.

How, after decades of undeniable racial progress, did we end up with this virtual gulag of racial incarceration?

Part of the answer is a law enforcement system that unfairly focuses on drug offenses and other crimes more likely to be committed by blacks, combined with draconian mandatory sentencing and an absurdly counterproductive retreat from rehabilitation as an integral method of dealing with offenders. An unrealistic fear of crime that is fed in part by politicians and the press, a tendency to emphasize punitive measures and old-fashioned racism are all at play here.

But there is another equally important cause: the simple fact that young black men commit a disproportionate number of crimes, especially violent crimes, which cannot be attributed to judicial bias, racism or economic hardships. The rate at which blacks commit homicides is seven times that of whites.

Why is this? Several incidents serendipitously occurring at around the same time as the march on Jena hint loudly at a possible answer.

• In New York City, the tabloids published sensational details of the bias suit brought by a black former executive for the Knicks, Anucha Browne Sanders, who claims that she was frequently called a “bitch” and a “ho” by the Knicks coach and president, Isiah Thomas. In a video deposition, Thomas said that while it is always wrong for a white man to verbally abuse a black woman in such terms, it was “not as much…I’m sorry to say” for a black man to do so.
• Across the nation, religious African-Americans were shocked that the evangelical minister Juanita Bynum, an enormously popular source of inspiration for churchgoing black women, said she was brutally beaten in a parking lot by her estranged husband, Bishop Thomas Weeks.
• O. J. Simpson, the malevolent central player in an iconic moment in the nation’s recent black-white (as well as male-female) relations, reappeared on the scene, charged with attempted burglary, kidnapping and felonious assault in Las Vegas, in what he claimed was merely an attempt to recover stolen memorabilia.

These events all point to something that has been swept under the rug for too long in black America: the crisis in relations between men and women of all classes and, as a result, the catastrophic state of black family life, especially among the poor. Isiah Thomas’s outrageous double standard shocked many blacks in New York only because he had the nerve to say out loud what is a fact of life for too many black women who must daily confront indignity and abuse in hip-hop misogyny and everyday conversation.

What is done with words is merely the verbal end of a continuum of abuse that too often ends with beatings and spousal homicide. Black relationships and families fail at high rates because women increasingly refuse to put up with this abuse. The resulting absence of fathers—some 70 percent of black babies are born to single mothers—is undoubtedly a major cause of youth delinquency.

The circumstances that far too many African-Americans face—the lack of paternal support and discipline; the requirement that single mothers work regardless of the effect on their children’s care; the hypocritical refusal of conservative politicians to put their money where their mouths are on family values; the recourse by male youths to gangs as parental substitutes; the ghetto-fabulous culture of the streets; the lack of skills among black men for the jobs and pay they want; the hypersegregation of blacks into impoverished inner-city neighborhoods—all interact perversely with the prison system that simply makes hardened criminals of nonviolent drug offenders and spits out angry men who are unemployable, unreformable and unmarriageable, closing the vicious circle.

Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and other leaders of the Jena demonstration who view events there, and the racial horror of our prisons, as solely the result of white racism are living not just in the past but in a state of denial. Even after removing racial bias in our judicial and prison system—as we should and must do—disproportionate numbers of young black men will continue to be incarcerated.

Until we view this social calamity in its entirety—by also acknowledging the central role of unstable relations among the sexes and within poor families, by placing a far higher priority on moral and social reform within troubled black communities, and by greatly expanding social services for infants and children—it will persist.

How should democracies balance the hopes and constraints of their societies with the architecture of their constitutions and institutions to secure freedom, promote citizenship, and foster prosperity? In The Construction of Democracy, leading scholars from seven different countries—and key decision makers from eight—come together to analyze the dimensions of democratic design and draw not only practical but feasible recommendations. Here citizens, politicians, and government officials offer valuable insight into the craft of politics with real examples of success and failures from some of the leading policy makers of our time—including the president of Portugal, former presidents of Brazil and Colombia, and a former prime minister of India. In a rare instance where the expertise of practical-minded scholars is melded with the experience of thoughtful policy makers, this volume offers much-needed insight to others seeking sensible and effective solutions.

We conduct an econometric analysis of the economic and social factors which contributed to the spread of violent conflict in Nepal. We find that conflict intensity is significantly higher in places with greater poverty and lower levels of economic development. Violence is higher in locations that favor insurgents, such as mountains and forests. We find weaker evidence that caste divisions in society are correlated with the intensity of civil conflict, while linguistic diversity has little impact.

This paper establishes a robust stylized fact: changes in the revealed comparative advantage of nations are governed by the pattern of relatedness of products at the global level. As countries change their export mix, there is a strong tendency to move towards related goods rather than to goods that are farther away. The pattern of relatedness of products is only very partially explained by similarity in broad factor or technological intensities, suggesting that the relevant determinants are much more product-specific. Moreover, the pattern of relatedness of products exhibits very strong heterogeneity: there are parts of this ‘product space’ that are dense while others are sparse. This implies that countries that are specialized in a dense part of the product space have an easier time at changing their revealed comparative advantage than countries that are specialized in more disconnected products.

The classical Heckscher-Ohlin-Mundell paradigm states that trade and capital mobility are substitutes, in the sense that trade integration reduces the incentives for capital to ‡ow to capital-scarce countries. In this paper we show that in a world with heterogeneous …nancial development, the classic conclusion does not hold. In particular, in less …nancially developed economies (South), trade and capital mobility are complements. Within a dynamic framework, the complementarity carries over to (…nancial) capital ‡ows. This interaction implies that deepening trade integration in South raises net capital in‡ows (or reduces net capital out‡ows). It also implies that, at the global level, protectionism may back…re if the goal is to rebalance capital ‡ows, when these are already heading from South to North. Our perspective also has implications for the e¤ects of trade integration on factor prices. In contrast to the Heckscher- Ohlin model, trade liberalization always decreases the wage-rental in South: an anti-Stolper- Samuelson result.

Cambridge, Mass.

Several recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it.

The main cause for this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960's: the rejection of any explanation that invokes a group's cultural attributes—its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its members—and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing.

Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and a co-author of one of the recent studies, typifies this attitude. Joblessness, he feels, is due to largely weak schooling, a lack of reading and math skills at a time when such skills are increasingly required even for blue-collar jobs, and the poverty of black neighborhoods. Unable to find jobs, he claims, black males turn to illegal activities, especially the drug trade and chronic drug use, and often end up in prison. He also criticizes the practice of withholding child-support payments from the wages of absentee fathers who do find jobs, telling The Times that to these men, such levies “amount to a tax on earnings.”

His conclusions are shared by scholars like Ronald B. Mincy of Columbia, the author of a study called “Black Males Left Behind,” and Gary Orfield of Harvard, who asserts that America is “pumping out boys with no honest alternative.”

This is all standard explanatory fare. And, as usual, it fails to answer the important questions. Why are young black men doing so poorly in school that they lack basic literacy and math skills? These scholars must know that countless studies by educational experts, going all the way back to the landmark report by James Coleman of Johns Hopkins University in 1966, have found that poor schools, per se, do not explain why after 10 years of education a young man remains illiterate.

Nor have studies explained why, if someone cannot get a job, he turns to crime and drug abuse. One does not imply the other. Joblessness is rampant in Latin America and India, but the mass of the populations does not turn to crime.

And why do so many young unemployed black men have children—several of them—which they have no resources or intention to support? And why, finally, do they murder each other at nine times the rate of white youths?

What's most interesting about the recent spate of studies is that analysts seem at last to be recognizing what has long been obvious to anyone who takes culture seriously: socioeconomic factors are of limited explanatory power. Thus it's doubly depressing that the conclusions they draw and the prescriptions they recommend remain mired in traditional socioeconomic thinking.

What has happened, I think, is that the economic boom years of the 90's and one of the most successful policy initiatives in memory—welfare reform—have made it impossible to ignore the effects of culture. The Clinton administration achieved exactly what policy analysts had long said would pull black men out of their torpor: the economy grew at a rapid pace, providing millions of new jobs at all levels. Yet the jobless black youths simply did not turn up to take them. Instead, the opportunity was seized in large part by immigrants—including many blacks—mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean.

One oft-repeated excuse for the failure of black Americans to take these jobs—that they did not offer a living wage—turned out to be irrelevant. The sociologist Roger Waldinger of the University of California at Los Angeles, for example, has shown that in New York such jobs offered an opportunity to the chronically unemployed to join the market and to acquire basic work skills that they later transferred to better jobs, but that the takers were predominantly immigrants.

Why have academics been so allergic to cultural explanations? Until the recent rise of behavioral economics, most economists have simply not taken non-market forces seriously. But what about the sociologists and other social scientists who ought to have known better? Three gross misconceptions about culture explain the neglect.

First is the pervasive idea that cultural explanations inherently blame the victim; that they focus on internal behavioral factors and, as such, hold people responsible for their poverty, rather than putting the onus on their deprived environment. (It hasn't helped that many conservatives do actually put forth this view.)

But this argument is utterly bogus. To hold someone responsible for his behavior is not to exclude any recognition of the environmental factors that may have induced the problematic behavior in the first place. Many victims of child abuse end up behaving in self-destructive ways; to point out the link between their behavior and the destructive acts is in no way to deny the causal role of their earlier victimization and the need to address it.

Likewise, a cultural explanation of black male self-destructiveness addresses not simply the immediate connection between their attitudes and behavior and the undesired outcomes, but explores the origins and changing nature of these attitudes, perhaps over generations, in their brutalized past. It is impossible to understand the predatory sexuality and irresponsible fathering behavior of young black men without going back deep into their collective past.

Second, it is often assumed that cultural explanations are wholly deterministic, leaving no room for human agency. This, too, is nonsense. Modern students of culture have long shown that while it partly determines behavior, it also enables people to change behavior. People use their culture as a frame for understanding their world, and as a resource to do much of what they want. The same cultural patterns can frame different kinds of behavior, and by failing to explore culture at any depth, analysts miss a great opportunity to re-frame attitudes in a way that encourages desirable behavior and outcomes.

Third, it is often assumed that cultural patterns cannot change—the old “cake of custom” saw. This too is nonsense. Indeed, cultural patterns are often easier to change than the economic factors favored by policy analysts, and American history offers numerous examples.

My favorite is Jim Crow, that deeply entrenched set of cultural and institutional practices built up over four centuries of racist domination and exclusion of blacks by whites in the South. Nothing could have been more cultural than that. And yet America was able to dismantle the entire system within a single generation, so much so that today blacks are now making a historic migratory shift back to the South, which they find more congenial than the North. (At the same time, economic inequality, which the policy analysts love to discuss, has hardened in the South, like the rest of America.)

So what are some of the cultural factors that explain the sorry state of young black men? They aren't always obvious. Sociological investigation has found, in fact, that one popular explanation—that black children who do well are derided by fellow blacks for “acting white”—turns out to be largely false, except for those attending a minority of mixed-race schools.

An anecdote helps explain why: Several years ago, one of my students went back to her high school to find out why it was that almost all the black girls graduated and went to college whereas nearly all the black boys either failed to graduate or did not go on to college. Distressingly, she found that all the black boys knew the consequences of not graduating and going on to college ("We're not stupid!" they told her indignantly).

SO why were they flunking out? Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the “cool-pose culture” of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black.

Not only was living this subculture immensely fulfilling, the boys said, it also brought them a great deal of respect from white youths. This also explains the otherwise puzzling finding by social psychologists that young black men and women tend to have the highest levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups, and that their self-image is independent of how badly they were doing in school.

I call this the Dionysian trap for young black men. The important thing to note about the subculture that ensnares them is that it is not disconnected from the mainstream culture. To the contrary, it has powerful support from some of America's largest corporations. Hip-hop, professional basketball and homeboy fashions are as American as cherry pie. Young white Americans are very much into these things, but selectively; they know when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book.

For young black men, however, that culture is all there is—or so they think. Sadly, their complete engagement in this part of the American cultural mainstream, which they created and which feeds their pride and self-respect, is a major factor in their disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream.

Of course, such attitudes explain only a part of the problem. In academia, we need a new, multidisciplinary approach toward understanding what makes young black men behave so self-destructively. Collecting transcripts of their views and rationalizations is a useful first step, but won't help nearly as much as the recent rash of scholars with tape-recorders seem to think. Getting the facts straight is important, but for decades we have been overwhelmed with statistics on black youths, and running more statistical regressions is beginning to approach the point of diminishing returns to knowledge.

The tragedy unfolding in our inner cities is a time-slice of a deep historical process that runs far back through the cataracts and deluge of our racist past. Most black Americans have by now, miraculously, escaped its consequences. The disconnected fifth languishing in the ghettos is the remains. Too much is at stake for us to fail to understand the plight of these young men. For them, and for the rest of us.

Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard and a faculty associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, is the author of Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries.

Mi obra, incluyendo este libro, no es Castrocéntrica, al menos en comparación con una buena parte de los libros y artículos publicados sobre Cuba. El nombre de Fidel Castro no aparece en los títulos de mis libros, y, con una sola excepción, tampoco en los títulos de los artículos reproducidos en este libro. Es, por supuesto, imposible escribir sobre la historia política contemporánea de Cuba ignorando la figura central de Fidel Castro, pero considero que es un error escribir sobre política en Cuba como si no hubiera otra cosa más que decir que lo que tenga que ver directamente con su persona. Es cierto que Fidel Castro ha gobernado a su manera, pero no es menos importante insistir que no lo ha hecho sólo. Hasta el artículo sobre la sucesión política de Cuba en este libro se resiste a discutir exclusivamente los temas individuales e insiste en considerar elementos institucionales y colectivos más allá de personas con nombre y apellido, más allá de la mortalidad de Fidel Castro. Son muchos los funcionarios, no una sola persona, que gobiernan Cuba día a día. Y son muchos los cubanos, no solamente Fidel Castro, que construyeron la Revolución.

The relations between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and nearly all Latin American countries blossomed during the first half of the first decade of the twenty-first century. “China fever” gripped the region. Latin American presidents, ministers, business executives and journalists “discovered” China and its rapidly growing impact on the world’s economy and on Latin America itself.

The principal explanation for this boom in “China fever” was China’s own economic boom and its widening and deepening worldwide spread. In the current decade, Sino-Latin American trade, and economic relations more generally, have grown at a spectacular pace. Improved political relations were a necessary part of the expansion in economic relations because intergovernmental agreements facilitate economic relations, but the exuberance of the economic boom outpaced the improvement in political relations. Military or militarily-sensitive relations changed little, notwithstanding the fears of some in the United States and elsewhere over this question.

We study a small open economy characterized by two empirically important frictions—incomplete financial markets and an inability of the government to commit to policy. We characterize the best sustainable fiscal policy and show that it can amplify and prolong shocks to output. In particular, even when the government is completely benevolent, the government’s credibility not to expropriate capital endogenously varies with the state of the economy and may be "scarcest" during recessions. This increased threat of expropriation depresses investment, prolonging downturns. It is the incompleteness of financial markets and lack of commitment that generate investment cycles even in an environment where first best capital stock is constant.

This paper argues that current account statistics may provide a poor indication for the real evolution of a country’s net foreign assets. This may be due to a series of factors including the mismeasurement of FDI, unreported trade of insurance or liquidity services and debt relief. Because of these problems we suggest estimating net foreign assets by capitalizing the net investment income and then estimating the current account from the changes in this stock of foreign assets. We call dark matter the difference between our measure of net foreign assets and that portrayed by official statistics. We find dark matter to be important for many countries and that it relates to FDI flows, domestic volatility, and debt relief. We also find that, once dark matter is taken into account, global net asset positions appear to be relatively stable. In particular, the exports of dark matter of the US appear to be fairly steady and large enough to keep the US net asset position stable, casting doubts on the need for a major adjustment of the dollar or a large rebalancing of the global economy.

We study episodes where economic growth decelerates to negative rates. While the majority of these episodes are of short duration, a substantial fraction last for a longer period of time than can be explained as the result of business-cycle dynamics. The duration, depth and associated output loss of these episodes differs dramatically across regions. We investigate the factors associated with the entry of countries into these episodes as well as their duration. We find that while countries fall into crises for multiple reasons, including wars, export collapses, sudden stops and political transitions, most of these variables do not help predict the duration of crises episodes. In contrast, we find that a measure of the density of a country's export product space is significantly associated with lower crisis duration. We also find that unconditional and conditional hazard rates are decreasing in time, a fact that is consistent with either strong shocks to fundamentals or with models of poverty traps.

This paper clarifies how dark matter changes our assessment of the US external imbalance. Dark matter assets are defined as the capitalized value of the return privilege obtained by US assets. Because this return privilege has been steady over recent decades, it is likely to persist in the future or even to increase, as it becomes leveraged by an increasingly globalized world. Once this is included in future projections of US current accounts, the US external position looks much more balanced than depicted in official statistics.

U.S. Latinos–Puerto Ricans and Cuban–Americans excepted in specific instances—have had limited impact on U.S. policy toward Latin America because they lack the interest and the resources to do so, and the capacity to act in concert for foreign policy purposes. Moreover, Latinos as a category do not have a shared Latin American foreign policy agenda. To the extent that they engage at all in the foreign policy arena, they typically do so in relation to their countries of origin. In many cases, however, they dislike the government of their homeland. In those relatively rare cases when U.S. Latino elites have sought to influence U.S. foreign policy, they have characteristically followed the lead of the U.S. government instead of seeking to change the main features of U.S. policy toward Latin America. This paper considers several case studies: the Puerto Rican influence on the Alliance for Progress; the Cuban–American influence on U.S. policy toward Cuba; the Mexican–American behavior relative to the enactment of NAFTA and U.S.–Mexican migration negotiations in 2001; and the Central American impact on U.S. immigration policies in the mid–1990s.

Increasing efficiency of education is a major goal in Mexico, as in much of Latin America. Education provides much of the human and social capital needed for effective participation in society and at work. Fernando Reimers argues that serious improvements in the quality of education must focus on questions of purpose as well as of efficiency in the delivery of education. Too often the concern with efficiency overrides fundamental questions about the purposes of schools. Often policy reforms to address efficiency make unwarranted asumptions about contextual conditions that can turn the intended purposes of those policies on their heads; for instance, the current popularity of policies to expand the decision making authority of principals assumes that they have incentives and are capable of improving instruction in schools. Reimers shows how in Mexico there are serious problems that undermine the effectiveness of school principals: part of the explanation for the lack of efficiency in education lies with social attitudes that favor men and make it difficult for women to advance in their professions. This in turn creates deep problems for the purpose of teaching students an egalitarian and tolerant set of values, essential to effective citizenship in a democratic society. In this chapter Reimers demonstrates how to productively combine a focus on the purposes of schools with a focus on the efficiency of education delivery.

The existence of social inequalities in health outcomes is well established in social science research. One strand of research focuses on inequalities in health within a single country. A separate and newer strand of research focuses on the relationship between aggregate inequality and population health across countries. Despite the theorization of (presumably variable) social conditions as "fundamental causes" of health (Link and Phelan 1995), the cross-national literature has focused on population health as the central outcome. Controversies currently surround macro-structural determinants of overall population health such as income inequality (Wilkinson 1996), the welfare state (Conley and Springer 2001), and economic development (Firebaugh and Beck 1994). We argue that these debates would be advanced by conceptualizing inequalities in health as cross-national variables that are sensitive to social conditions. Using data from the third wave of the World Values Survey, we examine cross-national variation in inequalities in health. The results reveal dramatic variation in variations in health according to income and education. We conclude by discussing the policy implications of significant cross-national variability in the socioeconomic gradient.

This paper explores export performance in South Africa over the past 50 years,and concludes that a lagging process of structural transformation is part of the explanation for stagnant exports per capita. Slow structural transformation in South Africa is found to be a consequence of the peripheral nature of South Africa’s productive capabilities. We apply new tools to evaluate South Africa’s future prospects for structural transformation, as well as to explore the sectoral priorities of the DTI's draft industrial strategy. We then discuss policy conclusions, advocating an 'open-architecture' industrial policy where the methods applied herein are but one tool to screen private sector requests for sector-specific coordination and public goods.