Politics, Policy, and Asset Inequality after the Minority Rights Revolution

• In Event: The American State's Retreat from Civil Rights

Abstract

In public-private policies, policy feedback can shape market providers’ conceptions of their self-interest through policies’ effects on the potential profits that providers can make from engaging in favored activities. This posed an obstacle for minority rights advocates of the 1960s and 1970s, who continued to face challenges ensuring fair access to mortgage credit and retirement security after the passage of new laws outlawing housing and employment discrimination. Drawing from archival evidence of government and activist activities in the fields of employer-sponsored retirement benefits and mortgage discrimination, this paper traces how earlier private social policies shaped private providers’ conceptions of profitable activity, and how these ideas about profit took on their own force, constraining the ability of legal developments in civil rights law to bring about greater equality of access to homeownership and employer-sponsored benefits on-the-ground. The paper contributes both to our understanding of policy feedback by exploring its relationship to economic ideas, as well as to debates surrounding the reasons for the persistence material inequality along racial and gender lines in the wake of the minority rights revolution.

Author

• Chloe Thurston, Northwestern University