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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I AM GRATEFUL to Christopher Jencks for an extensive, illuminating, and selfless email correspondence conducted intermittently over the years; those exchanges helped me to think through many methodological and substantive issues. Seminar presentations to the Bard College faculty and at Bard’s Levy Economics Institute helped me more than participants probably realize , as did peppering my colleagues with questions. I am especially grateful to Asena Caner, Sanjaya De Silva, Michael Donnelly, Yuval Elmelech, Dimitri Papadimitriou, Andrew Pearlman, and Ajit Zacharias. Presentations at the CUNY Graduate Center and the Radcliffe Institute helped in the same way. Other conversations helped as well—some extensive, some brief but reorienting—with Alejandro Portes, James Rebitzer, Joseph Stiglitz, Mary Waters, and William Julius Wilson. Robert Margo and Roger Waldinger not only exchanged long, thoughtful emails with me over a long period, but they—as well as Richard Alba and Stanley Engerman—read an early draft of the entire manuscript; the four sets of comments on that draft greatly improved the later drafts. The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College has supported me financially and has given me a place to work independently in peace, a place where I can also draw on a helpful support staff—a boon whose value anyone who aspires to research will understand. I am especially grateful for the staff work of Linda Christensen and Rae Ann Moore, and the incomparable administrative skills of Susan Howard. This particular project grew out of a Russell Sage Foundation grant, administered with sensible flexibility and much patience by project officer Stephanie Platz. Genna Patacsil and David Haproff of the Foundation’s Publications and Communications divisions shepherded the transformation of manuscript into book. And I ACKNOWLEDGMENTS owe a special debt to Suzanne Nichols, director of publications at the Foundation ; in early stages she went far beyond the call of duty to help this transformation along. All in all, it is a pleasure to thank both the Institute and the Foundation for such sustained aid, and more personally the presidents of each, Dimitri Papadimitriou and Eric Wanner. Of course, I alone am responsible for what I made of all this help. xii ...

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