By Sarah Treuhaft, Angela Glover Blackwell, and Manuel Pastor

Written to frame the conversation among 2,300 equity advocates and practitioners at the fourth national PolicyLink Equity Summit 2011 in Detroit, our paper America’s Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model presents a new framework for thinking about equity and America’s economic future. In it, we argue that as the nation witnesses new extremes of inequality alongside the emergence of a new people-of-color majority, equity has become more than a matter of social justice or morality and is now an economic imperative. We suggest some policy directions for building an equitable economy and call for broad-based social movement to advance this agenda.

The summary of the paper below incorporates relevant data on California’s demographic shifts alongside the national statistics. The complete version of the paper can be found at http://www.policylink.org/EquityIsSuperiorGrowthModel.

America Needs A New Growth Model

The nation’s current economic model is broken. Over the past several decades, economic growth has slowed, racial and income inequality has spiked, and the middle class has withered. America needs a new strategy to bring about robust growth that is widely shared by all who live within its borders.

The new growth model must embrace the nation’s changing demographics, and make the investments needed to allow the next generation to reach its full potential. The U.S. is undergoing a major demographic transformation in which the racial and ethnic groups that have been most excluded are now becoming a larger portion of the population. By 2042, the majority of the population will be people of color. Continue reading. . .