North America

On June 2, 1965, under a mandate established by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. Congress created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce federal anti-discrimination laws related to employment. The expectation was that African Americans would be prime beneficiaries of the EEOC.

Columbia professor Dan O’Flaherty explains how an awareness of racial trauma developed from growing up in Newark inspired him to write and teach on the economics of race.

Economics has a race problem.

Hoping to learn from other countries’ experiences in organizing finance for agriculture, more than 150 Americans were sent abroad in the summer of 1913 to investigate the minutiae of farm-credit systems in and around Europe.

In an Al Jazeera documentary “In Search of the Great American Job”, Institute scholar William Lazonick offers some arch insights into the relationship between financialization — particularly the “shareholder value” ideology in corporations, which drives the transfer of profits to shareholders through stock buybacks — and job creation and inequality.

Economist Darrick Hamilton and Institute President Rob Johnson discuss “stratification economics”, which addresses the failure of orthodox economics to see, explain and point to remedies for persistent racial inequality.

Scholar sees Institute for New Economic Thinking conference as an important opportunity to discuss issues of race and economics, and of Detroit’s past and future 

Historian Prof. Thomas Sugrue offers a critique of the conventional wisdom that roots the city’s fate in the racial tension of the tumultuous ‘60s and the decline of the auto industry.

In this Q-and-A, historian and National Book Award finalist Heather Ann Thompson argues that draconian police tactics in black Detroit neighborhoods had as much to do with the city’s decimation as white flight and lost jobs.

Improvements in data collection create potential for better outcomes for the LGBT community.

Institute for New Economic Thinking President Robert Johnson, in an appearance of the CNN International show Quest Means Business, warns that the anger of Trump’s supporters is unlikely to ebb absent significant economic and political changes — and that this anger could be more successfully marshaled by a more skilled and sophisticated Republican challenger four years from now. 

Theoretical dogmas that are literally blind to the causes of the racism that determines the economic fates of most African-Americans leaves the economics profession unable to comprehend or recognize remedies for a key driver of America’s crippling inequality. Instead, conventional economic models unmindfully shape policies that actually exacerbate racial conflict.

The 2008 financial meltdown wiped out what was left of the savings of millions of American families, but Professor Edward Wolff says decades of income inequality had set the stage for the collapse of their household wealth.

The US stands out as an outlier: the US spends far more on health than any other country, yet the life expectancy of the American population is not longer but actually shorter than in other countries that spend far less.

Oversights of two generations of social scientists have weakened democracy.