Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 25 of Art Carden’s excellent paper “Competition, Coercion, and African American Economic Progress in the Work of Robert Higgs,” which is chapter 1 of the hot-off-the-press Legacy of Robert Higgs – a collection of original papers, edited by my GMU Econ colleague Chris Coyne, in honor of the great economic historian Robert Higgs, who earlier this year celebrated his 80th birthday (most references omitted; links added):

Southern employers [in the post-Civil War United States] could discriminate legally. Many wanted to and were encouraged to; however, whether they could discriminate effectively is a question about the incentives they faced in Southern labor markets. Following Becker’s (1971) analysis, Higgs asked whether Black workers were systematically paid less than comparable white workers for the same work. He answers that they were not. If whites had a “taste for discrimination” for which their labor commanded a wage premium, it was extremely weak. Moreover, “equal pay within a given occupation was the most common practice,” and commercial discrimination was weaker and harder to identify than political discrimination. His conclusions were consistent with what he had found in a 1971 paper in the Journal of Economic History about immigrants, where he wrote that “the evidence is quite convincing that at least some American employers preferred wealth to the pleasures of discrimination.” The free market did not eliminate discrimination but punished it.