An Evaluation of the Labor Market Status of Chinese Americans

Abstract

The persistence of wide disparities in family income by race and the failure of education to raise the wages of the non-white population as a whole’ have long concerned social scientists who study the labor market in the United States. Two major approaches which attempt to explain these phenomena are the human capital school and the radical perspective. The human capital school recognizes the importance of investment in people as an underlying principle in the theoretical and empirical analysis of income distribution. According to this school, differences among individuals in their stock of “human capital” (level of education, years of work experience) explain much of the variation in their earnings.‘ Other socioeconomic factors, such as legislation, housing, and the health and welfare systems are assumed to have no significant impact on occupation and earnings. In contrast, the radical perspective rejects the above assumption made by those of the human capital school as clearly untenable because of the various forms of institutional racism directed against ethnic minorities in the United States. This view questions the existing socioeconomic system and argues that the plight of various