| Historically, the U.S. government has passed legislation to mitigate discrimination and unequal access to education, employment, housing, and wealth for minorities. Federal programs such as affirmative action, school desegregation, and the Fair Housing Act were created in an effort to eliminate unequal access and allow minorities the opportunity to improve their socio-economic well-being.;In this dissertation, I address a pair of important public policy questions. First, what defines "progress" in terms of how we as a society view policies such as affirmative action, which were intended to address the social, economic, and political equality of minorities compared to whites? Second, how do we measure progress? This analysis sets out to frame this debate by talking about outcomes. How much do people succeed when they come out the other end? Utilizing common measures of inequality, I examined the extent to which whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and all other races have become more alike in their incomes, education, and occupations using census data from 1980 to 2010. Seven metropolitan areas were selected based on differences in their racial composition, residential segregation, and social inequality. There will be two main contributions from this study. First, I will establish a common metric for measuring how equal minorities and whites have become. Second, I will assess the extent to which the income, education, and job profiles of people from different races have become more or less alike over a 30-year span.;The research found significant differences between blacks, Hispanics and all other races compared to whites in the distributions of income, education, and jobs. Asians only differed significantly from whites on education. Race, time, and metropolitan region were significantly related to the variation in incomes, education, and job over three decades. Future research should examine these variables for gender, and across all major metropolitan areas. In the meantime, policy makers should begin to evaluate socio-economic outcomes of well-being to measure progress for groups that have faced historical discrimination. |
