For fifty years, the economist Gavin Wright has been writing about the political economy of the American South. Along with economists like Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, he helped pioneer economic modeling techniques to understand the history of American slavery. His books The Political Economy of the Cotton South and Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War are classic studies of the Southern economy’s evolution.

Recently, Wright has turned his attention to the twentieth century, examining the economic impact of the mid-century Civil Rights Movement in Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South. Though recent history writing has tended to downplay the impact of the Civil Rights Movement in light of continuing racial inequality, Wright’s book shows that the rise in black voting following the Voting Rights Act had important consequences for things like black access to public services.

Last month, he released a new paper with the Institute for New Economic Thinking looking at the way Southern politics were reshaped in the decades following the Civil Rights Movement. Taking on the popular idea that the Republican “Southern Strategy” of using coded racial appeals led inevitably to GOP dominance in the South, he argues that Southern politics was competitive until 1994, when NAFTA triggered massive deindustrialization, rendering white workers much more receptive to racial scapegoating.