Rereading Becker: Contextualizing the Development of Discrimination Theory

摘要

Gary Becker's "tastes and preferences" approach to labor market discrimination, articulated in The Economics of Discrimination ([1957] 1971), has been the dominant theory of discrimination within mainstream economics. Neoclassical economists have tended to treat Becker's construct as a general theory, a timeless model that can be applied to various forms of discrimination. Becker himself encouraged this interpretation. Instead, we provide an institutional analysis of Becker's work on discrimination that locates his theory within the social, economic, and political context of the mid 1950s, the period in which he wrote. In particular, Becker's focus on a desire for social and psychological distance as the basis for discrimination and his emphasis on job segregation as the critical outcome reflect the way civil rights issues were framed during this period. Our deconstruction of Becker's theory relies on the assumption, defended in our previous work, that the implicit wage theories guiding economic actors and policy mak-ers interact with the development of academic economic theory (Figart, Mutari, and Power 2002). Similarly, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, in their seminal study of racial formation in the United States, maintained that "[r]acial theory is shaped by actually existing race relations in any given historical period" (1994, 11).