Joshua Weitz

Brown University, Political Science, Graduate Student

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Research associate at the Academic-Industry Research Network. PhD candidate at Brown University beginning in the fall of 2017. I study the political economy of corporate governance, the history of economic and political thought, economic and political history, and the politics of ideas.
Supervisors: Mark Blyth (Brown University) and William Lazonick (The Academic-Industry Research Network)

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Employment Mobility and the Belated Emergence of the Black Middle Class

Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series

As the Covid-19 pandemic takes its disproportionate toll on African Americans, the historical per... more As the Covid-19 pandemic takes its disproportionate toll on African Americans, the historical perspective in this working paper provides insight into the socioeconomic conditions under which President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign promise to “build back better” might actually begin to deliver the equal employment opportunity that was promised by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Far from becoming the Great Society that President Lyndon Johnson promised, the United States has devolved into a greedy society in which economic inequality has run rampant, leaving most African Americans behind. In this installment of our “Fifty Years After” project, we sketch a long-term historical perspective on the Black employment experience from the last decades of the nineteenth century into the 1970s. We follow the transition from the cotton economy of the post-slavery South to the migration that accelerated during World War I as large numbers of Blacks sought employment in mass-production ind...

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Equality Denied: Tech and African Americans

Thus far in reporting the findings of our project “Fifty Years After: Black Employment in the Uni... more Thus far in reporting the findings of our project “Fifty Years After: Black Employment in the United States Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” our analysis of what has happened to African American employment over the past half century has documented the importance of manufacturing employment to the upward socioeconomic mobility of Blacks in the 1960s and 1970s and the devastating impact of rationalization—the permanent elimination of blue-collar employment—on their socioeconomic mobility in the 1980s and beyond. The upward mobility of Blacks in the earlier decades was based on the Old Economy business model (OEBM) with its characteristic “career-with-one-company” (CWOC) employment relations. At its launching in 1965, the policy approach of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission assumed the existence of CWOC, providing corporate employees, Blacks included, with a potential path for upward socioeconomic mobility over the course of their working lives by gaining a...

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How the Disappearance of Unionized Jobs Obliterated an Emergent Black Middle Class

Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series

In this introduction to our project, “Fifty Years After: Black Employment in the United States Un... more In this introduction to our project, “Fifty Years After: Black Employment in the United States Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” we outline the socioeconomic forces behind the promising rise and disastrous fall of an African American blue-collar middle class. During the 1960s and 1970s, blacks with no more than high-school educations gained significant access to well-paid unionized employment opportunities, epitomized by semi-skilled operative jobs in the automobile industry, to which they previously had limited access. Anti-discrimination laws under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act with oversight by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission supported this upward mobility for blacks in the context of a growing demand for blue-collar labor. From the late 1970s, however, the impact of global competition and the offshoring of manufacturing combined with the financialization of the corporation to decimate these stable and well-paid blue-collar jobs. Under the s...

Employment and Earnings of African Americans Fifty Years After: Progress?

Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series, 2020

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established in 1965 to implement Title VII... more The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established in 1965 to implement Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made it illegal to discriminate against an individual in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Coming into the 1960s, the employment opportunity that privileged the white male was much more than a job. By the 1960s, growing numbers of white men had employment that gave them steadily rising real earnings, often with decades of tenure at one organization. The “career-with-one-company” (CWOC) that had become the employment norm by the beginning of the 1960s included health insurance and a defined-benefit pension, both funded by the employee’s business corporation or government agency. CWOC is what, in the decades immediately after World War II, turned much of white America into a growing and thriving middle class. This was a white middle class made up of, at the lower end, blue-collar workers with no more than a hig...

The Equal Employment Opportunity Omission

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016

On June 2, 1965, under a mandate established by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.... more On June 2, 1965, under a mandate established by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. Congress created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce federal anti-discrimination laws related to employment. The expectation was that African Americans would be prime beneficiaries of the EEOC. There was no assumption that the EEOC, on its own, could reverse deep-rooted employment discrimination against blacks. But in the late 1960s there was optimism that, in combination with equal educational opportunity and the strong demand for unionized workers in the well-paid manufacturing jobs that marked the post-World War II decades, the EEOC could help to ensure that an ever-increasing number of blacks would ascend to the American middle class.

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Analysing threshold effects in the sexual dynamics of cyclically parthenogenetic rotifer populations

Sex in some cyclically parthenogenetic rotifers is triggered when a threshold population density ... more Sex in some cyclically parthenogenetic rotifers is triggered when a threshold population density is achieved. In Brachionus, accumulation of a mixisinducing protein (MIP) that the rotifers excrete into the medium is the proximal signal. Models explicitly accounting for MIP dynamics suggest that either (1) a positive feedback of MIP concentration on MIP production or (2) a switching relationship between the proportion of sexual females and MIP concentration is needed to produce a threshold response of mixis to population density. In order to examine both possibilities , experiments were conducted to estimate the sexual response to a dilution series of medium containing the MIP. The resulting sexual response patterns are consistent with the existence of a threshold response of mixis, but are insufficient to reject one hypothesized mechanism for the threshold response in favor of the other. However, the observed smooth increase of sexual offspring with MIP concentration is consistent with the hypothesis of positive feedback on MIP production, and deserves further investigation.

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Joshua Weitz

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