Race

Connecticut is the first state to fund and enact a baby bonds program, inspiring more states to create their own plans. Can it make a difference?

Cryptocurrency was supposed to change the economic outlook for Black America. For many, it made things worse.

James M. Buchanan’s defenders argue he was not racist because of his ties with the anti-apartheid economist W.H. Hutt, but this defense fails miserably

Despite his opposition to South Africa’s apartheid, Hutt embraced notions of black inferiority

MIT economic historian Peter Temin discusses his new INET-CUP book, Never Together: The Economic History of a Segregated America, in which he shows how efforts to bridge the gap between races were always undermined, resulting in constant economic hardship for Black people.

On April 4th, 1967, at a time when the justness and necessity of the Vietnam War was broadly accepted, Dr. King issued a stirring rebuke of the U.S. establishment. He was criticized heavily for challenging US foreign policy; he was told to stick to civil rights.

Lynn Parramore explores Peter Temin’s new book on the country’s two economic histories: progress for whites, slavery and segregation for Black people. He warns of a second-tier global future unless they come together.

EEO-1 employment data document the vast over-representation of Asian Americans and vast under-representation of African Americans at tech companies in recent years. How did this happen?

Economist Darrick Hamilton, co-author of a new report on wealth across racial and ethnic groups in Tulsa, Oklahoma, explores the legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre with the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Lynn Parramore.

Our world is full of fault lines—growing inequality in income and opportunity; systemic racism; health and economic crises from a global pandemic; mistrust of experts; the existential threat of climate change; deep threats to employment in a digital economy with robotics on the rise. These fundamental problems and others like them stem from a common crisis in values.

The plight of white blue-collar workers is well-known, but Blacks in that category were feeling the squeeze long before their white counterparts.

How once-promising Black upward mobility reversed course, and what can be done about it

In 1898, upwardly mobile Blacks in Wilmington, NC were terrorized and slaughtered in a violent insurrection that set the stage for Jim Crow – and the next 123 years. Hardly anyone really knows about it.

Formerly incarcerated Black people emerge from prison with far less education and social skills than white ex-cons. And they have great trouble forming families or earning a good living.

Join us for this lively and timely presentation, followed by Q&A.

“Build back” means restoring the government and business investments in the productive capabilities of the U.S. labor force that created a growing middle class in the three decades after World War II

Racial inequalities of wealth and income are pervasive. This episode of Debt Talks will feature a conversation with four prominent experts on the persistence of racial inequalities of wealth and income and the role of financial markets in shaping them.

Mainstream economics ignores historical and structural factors by design

To fulfill MLK’s vision of jobs and freedom for Black Americans, Washington must rein in corporate greed

To fulfill MLK’s vision of jobs and freedom for Black Americans, Washington must rein in corporate greed

Over and over again, US government policies designed to transfer and create wealth and economic opportunity were restricted to whites by design.

Researchers reveal the enemies to stability and prosperity that threaten us all.

Since the 1980s, the enemy of equal employment opportunity through upward socioeconomic mobility has been the pervasive and entrenched corporate-governance ideology and practice of maximizing shareholder value.

In this introduction to our project, “Fifty Years After: Black Employment in the United States Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” we outline the socioeconomic forces behind the promising rise and disastrous fall of an African American blue-collar middle class.

Economist Darrick Hamilton explains why confronting the racial wealth gap is the only way to address 400 years of discrimination.

Economist Darrick Hamilton explains that pursuit of profit, not hatred of black people, is the real root of discrimination.

Trevon Logan discusses the impact of structural racism in health and economics

Containing Slaves, Freedmen, Jim Crow laws and the Great Migration

This paper records the path by which African Americans were transformed from enslaved persons in the American economy to partial participants in the progress of the economy.

Economist Marie Mora discusses the deep economic crisis that has afflicted Puerto Rico for years

As young scholars, we have formulated a new plan for fostering diversity in both identity and scholarly thinking in economics—preconditions for academic rigor.

Decades before it caught on with other economists, Sadie Alexander was the first economist to recommend a government jobs guarantee in the US

Until 2008, rising home values gave the middle class a cushion amid growing income inequality. But following the financial crisis, that wealth has failed to return.

Adolph Reed, who researches race and politics, warns that “identitarian” politics can conceal the structural inequities of capitalism

It’s time to connect political violence with economic violence.

The economist reflects back on the racial justice leader who showed him the limits of his academic training.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders relied on black entrepreneurs to make their work possible

The vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 50 years later, and the relevance of his economic ideas today

Reflections on the Radical Vision of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last Major Speech

Economist Olugbenga Ajilore shows the high cost of the American government’s arming of local police with military weapons, which has exacerbated lethal use of force against black communities

Nina Banks assesses the legacy of the first African-American economist in the United States

Behind towering figures like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. were the taxi dispatchers, pharmacists, grocers, and other small business owners who were instrumental in making civil rights a reality.

A large literature has detailed the seminal roles played in the Civil Rights Movement by activists, new political organizations, churches, and philanthropies. But black-owned businesses also provided a behind-the-scenes foundation for the movement’s success.

Veiling among Muslim women is modeled as a commitment mechanism that limits temptation to deviate from religious norms of behavior. 

The World Economic Roundtable seeks to help the business, investment, and policy communities understand ongoing changes in the world economy and to promote a discussion of ideas that can advance the goal of a widely shared global prosperity.

The Role These Factors Play in Shaping Economic Knowledge and Behavior

Growing income inequality is threatening the American middle class, and the middle class is vanishing before our eyes. We are still one country, but the stretch of incomes is fraying the unity of our nation.

“Dual Economy” models were developed to explain growth in the developing world. Now they appear necessary to comprehend the high income trap that afflicts the world’s most developed economies.

Demand, Secular Stagnation and the Vanishing Middle-Class

This paper presents a model of mass incarceration in the United States, which has the largest proportion of its population imprisoned among advanced countries.

Professor Dutt discusses how group identity is key to addressing inequality and how inequality can disrupt group identity.

The “War on Poverty,” and the impact of public policy

Stanford economic historian Professor Gavin Wright, addressing the Institute’s conference on the economics of race, argues that the conditions facing the children of the great migration from the South are very different to the conditions for the children of those who stayed behind. 

Professor Tchen explores the many layers of “otherness” at work in America’s political economy

Professor Temin sees the US economy as bifurcated along lines analogous to the situation described in developing world economies by W. Arthur Lewis.

Presented by Professor Dan O’Flaherty at the Institute’s conference on the economics of race in Detroit on 11 November, 2016

Riots, lynchings and other forms of violence dramatically disproportionate impact on the lives and prospects of African inventors. That’s just one indicator, says Professor Lisa Cook, of the profound impact of racial violence on the economic structure

Extract from the keynote speech by the Rev. Dr. William Barber III at the Institute for New Economic Thinking conference on race and economics in Detroit on November 11

Professor Marlene Kim provided a riveting picture, via her personal family history of the exploitation of the Asian-American working-class in California. She challenged the invisibility of Asian-Americans in discussions of race in America, and also focused on the double burden of discrimination borne by women of color.

Notes from the Institute’s Director of Research on some significant papers and contributions produced in 2016 under the INET rubric 

Black Lives Matter movement co-founder Alicia Garza, addressing the Institute’s Detroit conference on the economics of race, placed the turmoil created by the 2016 election in the context of a backlash against the gains made by social movements challenging racial and social injustice. She argued that those movements now need, more than ever, “to show up for one another” at a local level to protect those gains

What Donald Trump does well, Professor john a. powell explains, is link economic concerns with ontological and racial concerns among his voters. Many economists and social justice activists, by contrast, try to reduce racial concerns to economic and class concerns. His presentation demonstrates the centrality, conscious or unconscious, of belonging and ‘otherness’ in comprehending the structures of society.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking’s recent Detroit event on race and economics noted both the structural impediments faced by African-Americans, and the impressive gains made in some communities despite those headwinds

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.

How economics underperforms in diversity, and some potential remedies

Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Network, shares a vision of how to bring economic opportunity to women of color

This paper analyzes white attitudes towards African Americans in the United States at different points in a business cycle from 1979- 2014.

In his keynote address to our #EconOfRace conference in Detroit, Rev. Dr. William Barber III issued a blistering critique of structural inequality in the United States, and urged economists to recognize their responsibility to the poor.

Renowned campaigner for social and economic justice to set the tone in conference keynote

Economics has a race problem.

Prof. Marlene Kim says her research has revealed that African-American women face triple penalties from race and gender bias, and the combination of those two

Getting rid of barriers to economic security is possible with the right policies at the right time. 

Language has always been a way to divide, conquer, classify, and control, but it also helps to constitute who we are and what we think. 

Renowned campaigner for social and economic justice to set the tone in conference keynote

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.

Black Americans remain second-class citizens in access to housing finance

Young women of all races and gender identities are powering movements from Black Lives Matter to immigration reform to reproductive justice to minimum wage and beyond. Researchers need to support their progress with metrics that capture the spirit they are building

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 

Wired profiles Color of Change leader Rashad Robinson and explores the challenges of movement-building in an era of digital activism

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.

Darrick Hamilton calls for spreading the benefits of asset-ownership to all Americans.

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.

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.

William Darity, Jr. has a new key to unlocking the mystery of inequality: stratification economics.

A new paper by Nancy Folbre offers an evidence-based refutation of ‘just-world’ assumptions

Marc Levin highlights the recent effects of hyper-gentrification in New York City’s West Chelsea, focusing on an intersection where an elite private school sits directly across the street from public housing projects.

If additional education is not the solution to racial inequality, what is?

The National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) in collaboration with the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET) are organizing India’s first “Law Economic Policy Conference (LPEC 2016)”. The aim is to bring together economic, legal and policy thinkers together to consider policy issues in a holistic manner.

Renewed attention on America’s stark and growing racial wealth divide requires critical thinking on policy remedies

In the past month, analysts from all disciplines have tried to make sense out of shooting deaths of blacks by police and also ambush attacks of police.

I’ve been thinking a bit more about Roland Fryer’s working paper on police use of force, prompted by this thread by Europile and excellent posts by Michelle Phelps and Ezekeil Kweku.