There is substantial racial and gender disparity in the American economy. As we will demonstrate, discriminatory treatment within the labor market is a major cause of this inequality. Yet, there appear to have been particular periods in which racial minorities, and then women, experienced substantial reductions in economic disparity and discrimination. Some questions remain: Why did the movement toward racial equality stagnate after the mid-1970s? What factors are most responsible for the remaining gender inequality? What is the role of the competitive process in elimination or reproduction of discrimination in employment? How successful has the passage of federal antidiscrimination legislation in the 1960s been in producing an equal opportunity environment where job applicants are now evaluated on their qualifications? To give away the answer at the outset, discrimination by race has diminished somewhat, and discrimination by gender has diminished substantially; neither employment discrimination by race or by gender is close to ending. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent related legislation has purged American society of the most overt forms of discrimination, while discriminatory practices have continued in more covert and subtle forms. Furthermore, racial discrimination is masked and rationalized by widely-held presumptions of black inferiority.

For two decades the acting white hypothesis-the premise that black students are driven toward low school performance because of racialized peer pressure-has served as an explanation for the black-white achievement gap. Fordham and Ogbu proposed that black youths sabotage their own school careers by taking an oppositional stance toward academic achievement. Using interviews and existing data from eight North Carolina secondary public schools, this article shows that black adolescents are generally achievement oriented and that racialized peer pressure against high academic achievement is not prevalent in all schools. The analysis also shows important similarities in the experiences of black and white high-achieving students, indicating that dilemmas of high achievement are generalizable beyond a specific group. Typically, highachieving students, regardless of race, are to some degree stigmatized as "nerds" or "geeks. " The data suggest that school structures, rather than culture, may help explain when this stigma becomes racialized, producing a burden of acting white for black adolescents, and when it becomes class-based, producing a burden of "acting high and mighty" for low-income whites. Recognizing the similarities in these processes can help us refocus and refine understandings of the black-white achievement gap.

Historically, economists have taken the position that psychological capital is either unobservable or unmeasurable; thus, heretofore, little evidence has been available on the contribution of psychological capital to wages. Using data drawn from two dgferent waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we offer evidence that psychological capital has both a direct effect-via self-esteemAnd an indirect effect-through locus of control-on an individual k real wage. We find a person 5 wage is more sensitive to changes in self-esteem than to comparable alterations in human capital. Both relative wages and human capital contribute to self-esteem. (JEL E24, 56)

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A major concern for labor economists has been to understand how wages, employment and productivity respond to variations in predetermined factors such as tastes for leisure and endowments of human capital. The starting point for their analysis has tended to emphasize choice rather than the circumstances that dictate the range of perceived options. In contrast, social psychologists have tended to have a greater interest in understanding the factors that economists customarily treat as predetermined in affecting aggregate outcomes in labor markets. When they direct their attention to subjects within the sphere of interest of labor economists, they ask about the roles of motivation, personality, cognitive ability and early childhood socialization in the formation of attitudes toward work and task performance. They seek to comprehend the processes leading to action, as well as the consequences of such action.The tension between the two approaches is reflected in Simon's (1986) important distinction between "the substantive view of human rationality" common to neoclassical microeconomics and "the procedural view of human rationality" common to psychology. We are convinced that a synthetic approach that combines elements of substantive human rationality with the real-time, procedural view of human rationality can improve our understanding of such phenomena as aggregate unemployment and aggregate productivity.Consider, for instance, a macroeconomic shock that unexpectedly exposes individuals to unemployment.

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