Another “Marshall Plan” Needed to Emancipate African Americans from the Vicious Cycle of Poverty

Abstract

African Americans are experiencing a critical market failure that is characterized by a vicious cycle of poverty. Among other proxies, the enduring poverty is mostly due to African Americans’ disenfranchisement in the price-driven economy. The proxies of poverty portray a large measure of unacceptable disparity between blacks and white people in contemporary America. Unlike the resolve of the Great Depression, the Great Recession and the various other recessions, this disparity is unlikely to be resolved by the price mechanisms. Particularly, the huge unemployment that characterizes African Americans suggests that the group experiences an economic depression in the presence of the whites’ economic recession. The US has an obligation to resolve the endemic African American poverty with another “Marshall Plan”, which needs to be deliberately and exogenously directed. This bailout can be likened to when the US was bailed out of the Western European economy after World War II with the Marshall Plan in 1948.