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Prospect A stagnating economy leaves most boats struggling, with those in the backwaters suffering the most. From 1973 through the early 1990s family incomes stagnated in the United States as growth in national productivity fell to just over 1 percent per year, less than half the annual increase from 1946 through 1972. Most economists predicted that such slow growth was the inevitable fate of mature industrial economies: as manufacturing productivity continued to increase, at close to 3 percent per year, fewer and fewer workers were needed in factories, and more and more ofthe workforce shifted into the service sector where, economists argued, sustained growth in productivity was nearly impossible . From 1970 through 1990 the number of neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty-mostly one-race ghettoes in inner cities-more than doubled. The statistics painted a grim picture of national economic stagnation and racial ghettoization expanding without end in metropolitan America. Fears mounted that the increasing wave of poor Hispanic immigrants from Central and South America and the Caribbean moving into many central city barrios would only compound the high-poverty concentrations of expanding black ghettoes within urban America. A rising economic tide, however, lifts all boats, including those struggling the hardest to join the mainstream. The economic expansion begun after the 1991 recession seemed at first just another modest upturn in the stream ofbusiness cycles since 1973-shallower recessions followed by modest expansions, but overall continuing stagnation in family incomes and in overall productivity as the shift from manufacturing to services continued. Starting in 1996 and continuing to this day, though, there has been a major structural improvement in our national economy. Overall annual productivity has surged to more than 2.5 percent per year, including during the longest economic expansion in U.S history in the 1990s, the mild and short recession of 2001, and the current expansion. Our burgeoning metropolitan areas led the world in this transition to highvalue -added services. Annual productivity in the service sector, which now already includes four times more workers in good-paying jobs than are employed in factories, averaged more than 2.5 percent per year. Family incomes rose apace, including in the lowest quintile and among minority families at all income levels. The rate of births in single-parent families declined dramatically , including among poor African American teens in high-poverty concentrations in inner cities. Even the ever cautious Federal Reserve concluded that the rise of this more productive knowledge economy meant that the unem409 410 Beyond Busing ployment rate could fall below 4 percent without inflation, compared to the 6 percent trigger they had assumed during the waning ofthe industrial economy over the prior generation. From 1990 to 2000 there was also a stunning decrease of more than onequarter in the number and geographic extent of high-poverty neighborhoods in inner cities. The percentage of black households living in high-poverty ghettoes declined the most of any racial or ethnic group, from 30.4 percent in 1990 to 18.6 percent in 2000. Despite the large influx of Hispanic immigrants , a large proportion of whom were poor, the percentage living in highpoverty barrios also declined significantly, from 21.5 percent in 1990 to 13.8 percent in 2000. As Hispanic Americans became the largest minority group in the United States, their patterns of initial location and migration appeared to mirror the migration patterns of earlier Anglo ethnic groups from Europe, as described by Karl Taueber at trial in the Detroit school case: not nearly so heavily concentrated upon initial entry as blacks from whites and, over time, moving steadily to join the mainstream migrations to better housing, jobs, and schools wherever located in metropolitan America. In addition, the extreme separation of black households from white continues a slow but sure decline across our growing metropolitan areas. Throughout the 1990s upwardly mobile black families increasingly moved to the suburbs, while highly educated young white adults migrated to knowledge-economy jobs growing in the most dynamic central cities. Make no mistake: ghettoization did not disappear between 1990 and 2000. The number of high-poverty neighborhoods in central cities is still higher than it was in 1970, despite the stunning decline from 1990 through 2000. Our nation's shameful disregard of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens in the flood ofNew Orleans in September 2005 offers a stark reminder of the nature and extent of the continuing harm of concentrated poverty. It is surely no consolation that 50 percent more low...

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