 Well, thank you so much for that generous introduction. I am thrilled to be back in Amherst, Massachusetts, a town that I grew up in. And as a couple of people have noted, I actually went to Amherst Regional High School years and years ago, so a lot of years ago, yeah. When I have the opportunity to give lectures of this type, I frequently want to issue a provocation. And that's no different this evening. I hope I will have issued a provocation by the time this talk is completed. But I'd like to begin with a story about India and Mohandaske Gandhi. In the 1930s, Gandhi was engaged in a crusade against the practice of untouchability. Now I want to be clear about this. Gandhi's crusade was not against casteism itself. A caste Hindu, Gandhi sought a reform of the caste system, not its abolition. Abolition was, of course, the objective of B. R. Ambedkar, the great Dalit leader. In fact, Ambedkar forcefully referred to his goal as annihilation of caste. So one could imagine a situation in the United States where slavery remains a legal practice and we could have a debate between those folks who wanted to reform slavery and those who wanted to abolish it. And I would argue that the Gandhi versus Ambedkar position is precisely that, a juxtaposition of a desire for reform versus a desire for abolition. However, the severity of the practice of untouchability was sufficient for Gandhi's attack on untouchability to be of great political significance. Now on January 15th, 1934, a violent earthquake struck Bihar. It was 8.4 on the Richter scale. It flattened the districts of Mazafapur and Munger. Thirty thousand people were killed and in Amarchya's son's words, it ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of others. Now in his memoir, Home in the World, Sin reports that Gandhi joined in the relief effort. But Gandhi also did something else. He decided to make a statement that identified the earthquake as a punishment given to the Indian people for the sin of untouchability. For Gandhi, the earthquake was divine retribution for India's evil practice. Sin, I believe, was only two years of age at the time, but he later became aware that other anti-untouchability activists like the great novelist and scholar Rabindranath Tagore were outraged by Gandhi's statement for three reasons. First, Gandhi had advanced an a scientific explanation for the causes of earthquakes. He had offered a divine explanation for the source of the earthquake. Second, the anti-untouchability activists who objected to Gandhi's position thought that there was no distinction being made between what we might perceive as guilt and punishment, that these were disconnected, that thousands of the individuals who had been killed or harmed by the earthquake bore no responsibility for the sin of untouchability, and in fact many individuals who were treated as untouchables died during the course of the earthquake. And third, and this is most important from the standpoint of our conversation this evening, they took the position that it was not legitimate, not legitimate to make a tactical use of scientific nonsense in helping a great cause, okay? Let me repeat that, it was not legitimate to make a tactical use of scientific nonsense in helping a great cause. And this third point is critical from the standpoint of the presentation that I'd like to make this evening because I think it embraces a general principle that is going to apply to the argument that I attempt to make this evening. And that principle is do not use a false or weak argument to support a great cause. This is effectively a propagandistic strategy, and I think it's important that this propagandistic strategy be challenged. And I'll explain in a moment what the argument is that is associated with this notion of a propagandistic strategy in the current moment. And that argument is the premise that if we get rid of racism, everyone will benefit. If we rid ourselves of the sin of structural racism, everyone will gain. More specifically, and this is an offshoot of the same argument, if we were to adopt a program of black reparations, it would be beneficial to all Americans. From this perspective, structural racism functions as a deadweight loss to the economy. And it would suggest that there's a certain degree of irrationality on the part of white Americans in maintaining an attachment to white supremacy. Stratification economics rejects the irrationality premise. And I would like to argue that, of course, there's a major element in contemporary economics that pushes the field away from its long-standing attachment to the rationality principle. And that is the field of behavioral economics. There are three examples that I would like to highlight from behavioral economics that make the point or attempt to make the point that human beings can behave in wholly irrational ways. So one example is the observation that people will buy things that they never actually use. I would argue that the presumption that that's irrational is contingent on assuming that people's tastes are fixed, which they are not. There can be variations in your taste over the course of a lifetime. And the point where you make the purchase, you may anticipate that you're going to use it, but subsequently your tastes change and you don't use it. But the other thing is we are social creatures. And so as a consequence, we engage with others. And sometimes the objects that we purchase are merely there for the purpose of display as a source of maintaining status. And status is a use. So let's, and we're going to come back to the importance of these social interactions in shaping people's beliefs as a counter to the claim that people behave irrationally. The second example that's frequently used is people following the herd in investment decisions. And by following the herd, they can be led to the trough or they can be led astray. I'm going to argue, though, that the reason why people frequently follow the herd is because of the condition of uncertainty that shapes the process of investment decisions and their concern about their reputations. Again, social interaction. Let me read a lengthy passage from chapter 12 of Keynes's general theory, which I think is relevant to this argument. Keynes said the following. Investment based on genuine long term expectation is so difficult today as to be scarcely practical. He who attempts it must surely lead much more laborious days and run greater risks than he who tries to guess better than the crowd, how the crowd will behave. And given equal intelligence, he may make more disastrous mistakes. There is no clear evidence that the investment policy which is socially advantageous coincides with that which is most profitable. It needs more intelligence to defeat the forces of time or our ignorance of the future than to beat the gun. Life is too short. He goes on to say, The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and over exacting to anyone who is entirely exempt of the gambling instinct. Whilst he who has it must pay to the propensity the appropriate toll. Furthermore, an investor who proposes to ignore near term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money. A further reason for the higher return from the pastime to a given stock of intelligence and resources. Finally, it is the long term investor, he who best promotes the public interest, who will in practice come in for the most criticism. Wherever investment funds are managed by committees or boards or banks. For it is the essence of his behavior that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness. And if in the short run, he is unsuccessful, which is very, very likely he will not receive much money. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. So you follow the herd because that's the conventional behavior and you are concerned about your reputation. Then third, a third argument that's frequently made in the behavioral economics crowd is the point about sunk cost. And individuals should not allow sunk cost. That is, if you purchase something and you spent on something like going to the theater and you don't manage to get to the show, well, it's a sunk cost so you shouldn't worry about it. It shouldn't affect your future decisions. Again, I would argue that this is really contingent upon whether or not our decisions are made in isolation or made in a social context. In a social context, we would not want to adversely affect our reputation by giving people the impression that we make purchases willy-nilly, that we don't follow through on, and that we might not be reliable for any kinds of loans or purchases that we might take or get or give them. So once we're in a social context where image, reputation, and status make a difference, then it alters the way in which we think about the calculus of rationality. So how does stratification economics fit into this? Well, stratification economics posits that individuals have not only an attachment to their relative position in comparison with others who they might identify as their peers, but they also have a concern about the relative position of the social identity group that they view as the one that they belong to. So stratification economics then puts us in a position where we put at the forefront questions concerning image, status, and reputation, but we link image, status, and reputation to material position as well. So let me turn next to this whole question of how we think about who wins or loses from racism. So given a social group identity where an individual is attached to the particular group that is in a dominant position in the society, they are probably going to be concerned about maintaining that position of dominance. They may be concerned about maintaining that position of dominance in a highly, highly conscious way, or it may be something that is an undercurrent that is shaping their decisions and their beliefs and attitudes. I want to emphasize that I want to distinguish between irrationality and misperception. These are not the same things. You can make wholly rational decisions, decisions that are predicated upon what you value with incorrect information. And, excuse me, I'm going to argue as we proceed that there are many instances in which incorrect information plays a role in the decisions that people make, but there's a paradox that I'm going to come to. So we frequently hear the point made that the white working class votes against its own self-interest due to its attitudes about race. That frequently the white working class votes against social policies that would be beneficial to them because they do not want to see any benefits going to black Americans or other social groups that they see as outside of their orbit. Well, if your position of self-interest includes an attachment to relative group position, then intrinsically, if you are an advocate of maintaining white advantage, then if that's part of your utility function, then by definition, you are acting in your self-interest if you're trying to preserve your relative position. So if you think that the policy that will be adopted would alter relative position to the disadvantage of your group, even if you are better off in an absolute sense, then self-interest is transparently being pursued. But that's not the argument that people usually try to make. They generally want to accept the idea that there may actually be a decline in the relative position for whites in a context in which whites might actually gain an absolute advantage. It's just that their absolute advantage will not be as large as the absolute advantage associated with the other group's gain or benefit, or here's the other argument, whites will actually reduce their absolute position for the purpose of maintaining their racial edge. And in this context, there's an argument that Heather McKee has made, which I refer to now as the swimming pool argument, where she talks about a southern community that rather than desegregating its pools, shuts the pools down for everybody. This would be similar to what occurred in Virginia and Farmville, Virginia, where under pressure to desegregate the schools, the Farmville School Board, the white school board in the early 1960s, chose to close the school system down altogether. So I'm going to argue first that these are symbolic acts that preserve a system of advantage. And I'm going to turn to a passage from a scholar who's at Amherst College, nearby, who talks about the symbolic nature of segregation practices that translate into material advantages for the dominant group. So she says the following, the segregation of public space served a number of purposes beyond ensuring that social association did not take place. As historians understand it, it worked to solidify racial difference, to mark black and white people as different, and one as inferior to the other after the institution of slavery had ended. Glinda Gilmore describes the segregation of public space as essential in reigning in upwardly mobile blacks and keeping them in their place, a place defined by low social status, low income, inability to vote, and low expectations. As a living testament to capabilities, successful black Americans' lives provided a perpetual affront to whites, Gilmore argues, the black lawyer, doctor, preacher, or teacher represented someone out of his or her place. The danger lay not in their numbers, but in the aspirations they inspired in their fellow African Americans and the proof that they gave to the white lie of inherent African inferiority. So there's a functional purpose associated with the swimming pool decision, but I would argue further that there is an assumption embedded in McGee's analysis that when whites deprive blacks of certain kinds of opportunities, they necessarily also deprive themselves of those opportunities. I'm going to suggest that in the instance in which the public swimming pools were closed, access was widely given to whites for private swimming pools, and in the context of the Farmville, Virginia story, the state of Virginia instituted a set of subsidies or additional vouchers that could go into the hands of white parents for the purposes of putting their children in all white private academies. Indeed, we can think about parental choice, the voucher system, as mechanisms that were introduced precisely for the purpose of preserving segregation. In this instance, black kids don't get the service, but white kids continue to do so, and there's a long history of white supporting policies that provided them with publicly funded benefits that were denied to black folks. Let's consider the history of land allocation in the late 19th century and early 20th century under the terms of the Homestead Act of 1862. The Homestead Act of 1862 ultimately resulted in the provision of one and a half million white families with 160-acre land allotments per family. Now, 1.5 million white families would constitute at the time approximately nine million people because I would estimate that there would have been about six persons per family. This is long before the family of four, but it's also a lower number than the family of eight or nine. If that's the case, then it would be approximately 10% of the white population by 1920 that received land. In contrast, at most about 10,000 blacks received land under the combination of the Southern Homestead Act and the experience of the exodusters in Kansas, and this would constitute approximately 2% of the black population at the time of emancipation, 4 million people. So, you know, you can clearly have a policy put in place that benefits one group and doesn't benefit the other, and the one group that's benefiting is in a position to exclude the other group from that service, but they're not denying themselves that service. Another example would be the New Deal legislation in the 1930s in which provisions were structured in such a way that eligibility for the New Deal, many of the New Deal benefits was contingent upon the type of employment you had. And so, workers who were serving in domestic positions as well as farm workers were excluded, and this had a vastly disproportionate effect on the black population in terms of access to these provisions. And then a third example is the GI Bill or the Servicemen's Readjustment Act that was passed toward the end of World War II where the provisions for that act included subsidies for home buying as well as for businesses in addition to the educational support elements. And as a consequence of the fact that the administration of the GI Bill was decentralized, local authorities systematically excluded black GIs from having the opportunity to benefit from the home buying and the business subsidy dimensions of it. So, again, whites get the public purses service and blacks are denied it. So, you know, what are folks voting for? They're not voting against their self-interest in that sense. They're voting for public policies that are structured in such a way that they exclude the group that they want to maintain an advantaged position over. Now, we may want to make the argument that in more recent episodes, we've got situations in which we've observed people voting against particular policies that would have benefited both them and blacks and not designing the policies in such a way as to exclude blacks altogether. But I think that you can also make the case that perhaps there are some other reasons why they were opposed to those policies and be glad to pursue that with you in the question and answer period if you like. Now, there's a second set of arguments that are made about how whites are hurt by racism which includes a series of empirical studies. Perhaps the one that's most familiar to people is a city group study that said that discrimination costs the American economy 16 trillion dollars. Now, that may be true, but I'm not sure it's a net loss. And I'm not at all sure that that number is really valid. How did city group come up with this figure? Well, they calculated the difference in income between blacks and whites that they could attribute to discrimination. And then they just said, if we add that level of income to black income, we will have a situation in which the total amount of income in the U.S. economy would have been 16 trillion dollars higher over a series of years. Well, this is an assumption that you could close the income gap simply by snapping your fingers and eliminating the differential in income. But in fact, if your mechanism is eliminating discrimination to try to eliminate discriminatory differentials in income, then you have to think about this process somewhat differently. Let's assume, and I think more than assume, I think the empirical data suggests this, that a climate of discrimination makes white wages higher than the mean and black wages lower than the mean. If you were to eliminate the discriminatory advantage for whites, then presumably while black wages rise as discrimination abates, white wages must actually fall. And so then we have the question about where the average wage rate settles. Does it settle above or below the wage rate that prevailed under discriminatory conditions? Some of this would have to be consequent upon whether or not we are in an environment that is close to full employment or in an environment in which there's high levels of unemployment. So it's contingent. It's uncertain. And if it's uncertain, then large numbers of people will be inclined to stick with the status quo if they perceive the status quo to be to their benefit. More serious set of studies I think are those that attempt to argue that if you have more diverse workforces, you will have higher degrees of productivity and performance. One of these studies is one that was recently done by McKinsey, I think circa 2020. Essentially people refer to this as the business case for ending discrimination or reparations that, you know, the business community would be better off. It would improve its performance. And then I presume there would be aggregate consequences to this. There's a study that Cecilia Conrad did in the early 1990s. And I'm trying to see if her son Conrad Miller, who is also an economist, has done a more recent version of this study. But in her study she used a macroeconomic framework and she asked whether or not changes in diversity in the workforce, changes in workforce demographics would have an effect on national output or national income. And what she found was the following. And this is very interesting. She found that variations in the demographic characteristics of the workforce had no effect on output per head, no effect. So there's no loss as a consequence of diversifying the workforce. There was apparently no gain either. And so if you think about this process in the aggregate, what Conrad's study is suggesting is that there's no variation or improvement or decline in national economic performance as a consequence of varying the degree of diversity of the workforce. Be nice if it was true, but that's not what she finds. If you think about G and P per capita, you can think about the relative incomes of blacks or whites changing under three conditions in which white incomes will fall relative to black incomes, okay? So you could have a circumstance in which both white and black incomes rise but the black income rises at a higher percentage. You could think of a situation in which black incomes rise and white incomes fall or you could think of a situation in which both groups incomes fall but the white proportion that fall is greater. Now the first circumstance is I think is the one that folks are arguing is a situation in which whites are resistant to a set of policies that would benefit them, okay? And that's the really tricky one. So if whites' relative position declines despite an absolute increase in white income then we can think about the question of whether or not there's some sort of false self-interest or false consciousness operating in their decision-making process. But for that to carry through in full, we would have to have a situation in which that change doesn't occur in such a way that there is some kind of damage to the relative position of whites on other dimensions that might be relevant. So I mentioned the fact that there is a difference between claiming that people are irrational and claiming that they have misperceptions and there is no doubt that Americans have a set of misperceptions on a host of issue but in particular they have misperceptions about the degree of inequality in the United States as well as the degree of inequality between blacks and whites in the United States. They grossly underestimate both categories of inequality and they underestimate those categories of inequality whether or not we're talking about income or wealth. Now the consequence maybe particularly if they also think if they are white Americans, if they also think that blacks are catching up in some way, the consequence will be support for policies that would repress black gains. And so the irony here is of course they may be incorrect. There was a tremendous amount of attention drawn to the notion that blacks were making an extreme degree of economic progress as a consequence of the election of Barack Obama. But the symbolic election of Barack Obama did not translate into any significant change in the economic status of black Americans. And so there was a misperception in operation and it led to a set of backlash effects that are reflected in the policies that were pursued by the Trump administration. Now here's the key point. Those policies may have been justified on the basis of misperceptions but they worked in the same direction. That is the direction of preserving white advantage or increasing or expanding white advantage. So it may not have been necessary to adopt those policies but those policies actually accomplished the goal that they were intended to achieve. So my final sets of comments have to do with the phenomenon of tragedy because I think that this whole set of arguments about the possibility that there are some significant losses to the dominant social group as a consequence of its practice of racism is a tragic conclusion. But it is a conclusion that we have to face up to if we're really thinking about making transformational change in this world. And I think we deflect ourselves from a really systematic and consistent effort to try to bring about those changes if we delude ourselves about what the issues really are. Now let me make three comments here in concluding that are associated with these tragic circumstances. First, exploitation and extraction from social group B does not necessarily mean that it will slow growth or adversely affect social group A. That's a key point. Exploitation and extraction doesn't necessarily mean that it will slow growth for the economy as a whole or reduce the economic well-being of social group A. Now an argument could be made that it adversely affects a subset of social group A. And that's the white working class kind of argument once again. But we have a tremendous amount of evidence that under a regime of racism, even the lowest income whites have some significant advantages, particularly in comparison with blacks as a whole. I would include in this database the fact that whites, regardless of their income level, have far superior differential treatment by the police from blacks of any class status. I would also add to this list the fact that whites in the lowest 20% of the income distribution have a net worth of approximately $15,000. Blacks in the lowest 20% of the income distribution have a net worth that is approximately zero. And the last time I looked, the ratio of any number to zero approaches infinity. And in addition, in W.E.B. Du Bois' famous discussion of the psychological wage that goes to lower income whites, he actually lists a set of advantages that are quite material, including their access to public spaces and their capacity of their children to go to the same public schools that are attended by other whites who are more affluent. So that's the first big point that an exploitative economy is not necessarily an economy that doesn't do well in an aggregate sense. And the history of enslavement in the United States should make that transparent, given the significance of the cotton textile sector, slave grown cotton, and the way in which the American economy developed particularly industrially in the latter half of the 19th century. Second point I'd like to make here concerns the nature of the political obstacle that is associated with the recognition that everyone is not hurt by racism. And in fact, significant numbers of people are not hurt by racism. We could flip the story around in terms of the relative numbers if we're thinking about a country like South Africa under apartheid. Ironically, of course, South Africa in terms of its overall per capita income was virtually the most affluent economy on the African continent. The distribution of that income was quite perverse. But, you know, again, if you're thinking about the dynamics of economic growth, once again, we have a situation in which high degrees of exploitation, we could refer to super exploitation, not necessarily associated with lower overall economic performance. And so this means we do have a serious political obstacle because if we are going to try to pursue an interstructural racism, if we're going to attempt to introduce a program of reparations for black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States, we have to recognize that this will not necessarily be beneficial to white Americans. And that makes the task of persuading the nation, a majority of the nation, to go that route much, much harder. Then related to this is the third and final point that I want to make is eliminating structural racism, introducing a comprehensive program of reparations necessarily will make the relative position of white Americans worse, the relative position. But the best we can do is ensure to the greatest extent possible that we do not harm white's absolute position. We don't make things worse. So in the work that I've done with Kirsten Mullen on reparations, we made the argument that if you're going to design a program of national reparations, you should do so in such a way that you don't actually increase taxes significantly for any Americans. And our rationale for thinking about designing the program that way was precisely this, that we did not want to introduce a program that would adversely affect the absolute position for white Americans. But we do have to confront the reality that the relative position will change. Actually, it should change. It must change. But if that relative position changes, then we have to have a society in which the commitment to racial advantage has diminished. And I'm not really sure how we get from here to there, particularly in the present moment. It may be easier to talk about that in this particular community, folks who have come to hear me speak this evening. But there are large segments of the American public who are not going to be particularly receptive to a change in their relative position, even if their absolute position would improve. Certainly not if their absolute position in some way declined. And so the answer to my question that I posed as the title of my talk is no. You know, racism doesn't hurt everybody. And it's unfortunate in a way that it doesn't because it makes it much more hard to think about ways in which we get to a better world. Thank you. Provocative and very rich, rich talk. So we're going to move to the question and answer period. This talk in this event is being live streamed. And so we need to use the mics. So if you have comments, questions for Professor Sandy Darity, what I'm going to ask you to do is just walk up to the center microphone and speak into that mic. I'm putting the hat on because my head is a little chilly. So the mic is open for anyone. Professor Darity, for those of us who are not economists or academics, could you give an example of how white people's absolute position, what the absolute position is and relative position in life is? Just an example, like a literal one, for people we know, what would that look like? How it would stay the same or it would change? Yeah, well, so I mentioned that if you look at the folks in the bottom 20% of the income distribution, the median net worth for white households is about $15,000 and it's about zero for black households. So we could hypothetically think about a situation in which those proportions changed. One way in which those proportions could change is for both black wealth and white wealth to increase. And suppose black wealth at the median for this lowest income group went to, say, $5,000. And white wealth went to $17,000. The ratio of white to black wealth would decline, but each group would have a higher absolute amount of wealth. And that's the circumstance in which, you know, if that were something that we could predict would happen as a consequence of a particular policy, that's the situation, I think, in which people are saying, well, you know, if white folks are opposed to that, that there's some sort of irrationality in their decision. And I'm saying that, you know, we have to think about what the full array of manifestations would be of the consequences of that kind of change to have a better sense. But the other circumstances in which you might have an increase in black wealth relative to white wealth are circumstances which I think are more transparent and generally negative for whites. So one of those circumstances could be a situation in which both black and white wealth fell, but white wealth fell more. And so you would have not only a decline in relative position, but you would have an absolute loss that's taking place for whites. Another circumstance is one in which black wealth goes up and white wealth goes down. And of course, we would think that there would be opposition to that arrangement as well. So the arrangement that we have to think about most carefully is a situation in which there's an improvement in black economic outcome and there is no change or an improvement in white economic outcomes, but the white gain is not proportionately as large as the black gain. Yeah. It is chilly down here. You're not imagining it. I've been studying education policy in the United States for close to 30 years now. And it seems like we've had this system that works very badly for students of color, particularly black students for generations. We see policies that come up that are intended or at least ostensibly intended to fix that problem and we don't fix the problem. So I'm curious to hear your take on who's benefiting from this circumstance because I feel like somebody must be. So there's a body of literature that we have incorporated into stratification economics that refers to the phenomenon of non-competing groups. A non-competing group is a group that has been subjected to a set of processes that prevent them from being as effective contestants in labor markets. So one argument you could make about the objective or purpose of having this type of poor schooling arrangements is that the goal is to diminish the competitiveness of black Americans in labor markets. And that works to the advantage of white Americans. Another kind of argument that I think is relevant is the notion of opportunity hoarding and preserving positions for one's own offspring. So we can think about very affluent communities or comparatively affluent college communities like Amherst where the process of classroom assignment, access to instruction and curriculum is racially differentiated. And this would mean that you would be preserving more opportunities for the white kids who are more likely to take a larger number of AP courses or I don't know if they have international baccalaureate in Amherst, they definitely do endure them. But this notion of racialized course assignment is another mechanism for preserving advantage or opportunity for one's own group. And that's something that's conducted by very affluent white families. So that would be my understanding. Now, is there some kind of economic loss? Well, there are people who make the argument that you're depriving very talented individuals with the degree of human capital that they could attain and that that slows down economic growth. That would only be true in an environment in which labor markets are consistently very tight. But if you're in an environment where there is unemployment, then, you know, there's a lot of flexibility in terms of who you hire and who you don't hire. And it may not matter very much if there are significant numbers of people who are denied the opportunity to really develop their talents. Now, the argument that I might concede to the folks who say that everybody might be hurt by racism is that this process of denying black people of the opportunity to fully develop their talents and abilities may create a creativity disadvantage for the entire society. A loss of innovation, a loss of new ideas, and that's particularly important in a challenging setting in which we're confronted with the possibility of full scale mechanization and actually the elimination of employment for all human beings. But, you know, I don't know if within the core of the black community there are young people who have the ideas that would help us better cope with that type of social environment. But it is a possibility and we definitely have denied ourselves those ideas and talents. You mentioned earlier about white folks voting against certain policies that might have been to their advantage and you were going to get back to that and talk to what some of those policies might have been and why they might have done that. Well, actually I was suggesting that historically they have voted for policies that benefit them and have ensured that blacks are frequently excluded from those kinds of benefits. So they don't have to reject a policy because it will benefit blacks since they can adopt the policy and make sure that blacks don't actually get it. Now, I don't know, there are some more recent episodes that people are claiming fit the mold of biting your nose despite your face, but I invite others to indicate what they think those are. But yeah, my point is, you know, white America has never had to deny itself something because it also wanted to deny it from blacks. Hi. Thank you very much for your talk. I'm a behavioral economist, so I especially enjoyed hearing the references to behavioral econ. So one of the things that I think is interesting about your talk was when you mentioned this preference that people have explicitly for an existing racial hierarchy. And one of the things that I study in subject to well-being, it talks about relative preferences and how the way that that has impacted subject to well-being over time has changed. So I guess my question is, do you think that there's a way that this preference for racial hierarchy could change over time? And also to the extent, do you think that our reference groups might be being impacted by things like media or things like that? Yeah. So yes, I do think preferences can change. I think that's the potential ray of hope in a way. I'm not sure how best you do that. I'm trying to say that we should not try to do it propagandistically. And that's why I have reservations about the argument that large numbers of whites are hurt by racism. I mean, if you go back to the court case in 1954 and the testimony from Kenneth Clark that was built into that court case, Clark's position was that white kids were hurt by school segregation. And I've never understood that argument. I don't know. Maybe he's making some kind of argument about their moral or character development or something like that. But I don't know of any substantive way. In fact, I think that when kids are in school, they don't really think very much about who else is not there. And so, yeah, I hope taste and preferences can change, but I'm not really sure how you go about doing that. I'm just saying I don't like the strategy of making an argument that is essentially not accurate as the basis for trying to propel that change. Thank you for a wonderful talk. My question, you sort of answered part of it already. I'm interested in what you see as the sort of political strategy for movement building that comes out of stratification economics and sort of what social movements can take out of that, aside from not making these propagandistic arguments. And then the second part of my question is, given the body of work in stratification economics, how do you explain interracial movement, civil rights movement, solidarity organizing that has happened and or that could happen? So in the paper that was published in the Journal of Economic Literature almost a year ago now, there's a section where I talk about the whole question of the political position of members of a dominant social group who in some way appear to be defecting from the dominant social group. And what are the conditions, who they might be? One of the arguments I try to make is that this is probably a segment of the community of dominant individuals who feel most secure about their position and status and probably don't feel like they will be very much affected if there is a change. And so, you know, can we expand that group or that pool? I don't know. This gets back to the question that was raised about changing taste. But I tried to struggle with that a bit. I'm not sure if I came up with any answers that would be satisfying, but please take a look at that. It's a beginning. Yeah. Thank you, Professor. There was a revealing talk. I came with the assumption that white working class is actually voting against its own well-being, but I'm largely convinced. You're fittingly started with the Indian case, right? And in the Indian case, I can understand because Ambedkar calls it as a graded system, the caste system as the graded system. So there are sections of the oppressed group, votes with the oppressor because there is somebody even below the oppressed group. There is a Brahmin and there is a middle caste and there are Dalits. So it is possible that the middle caste votes with the Brahmins because they retain the relative advantage over the Dalits. So at the end of your talk, I'm very much convinced to understand the voting patterns of the dominant social group. I'm coming from the recent evidence that the black community, the voting percentage in the recent election has increased. So is there a similar kind of a graded system that we can use to understand how the black communities would increase in the recent election it ordered for Trump compared to the 2016 election? So I'm not sure I can answer that question at all. I mean, I think of the United States as being a society in which there's what you're describing as a graded system as well. And I think what Patrick Mason has a new book called The Economics of Structural Racism. Isabelle Wilkinson has a book called Cast in which she's trying to argue that you could use the concept of cast to better understand what's happening in the United States. I would argue that what she means by cast, the way she's interpreting cast, she says, let's use cast instead of racism. But I would say that structural racism is exactly what she means by cast. And so I think that the notion that there's a graded, a gradational structure for the US population is actually quite, quite accurate. That gradational structure has ethnic correlations. And in the Indian context, you might want to argue that cast position has certain characteristics of ethnic variation. But you may not want to make that argument, but I think that's the real difference. So in the United States, for example, and this is really making use of, I think, of an overly aggregated category. But you could say that Asians have a position that has a certain degree of proximity to whiteness with an element of disdain. But there, along with whites, they are closer to the top end of the gradational structure. Blacks and Latinos are toward the bottom, but it's not necessarily all Latinos. It depends on which country they're from. So Dominicans and Puerto Ricans are at the bottom. And no question. But I think there's a gradational structure. Yeah, I think it's similar now. In terms of its implications for voting, that's tougher. I'm not sure. Yeah. Thanks, Andy, for a great talk. I guess I'll ask an obvious question, which is the extent to which your kind of analysis can be integrated into a broader set of class analysis. So that, for example, when we talk about the working class in general, in 1970, the difference between the corporate CEO pay and the average worker was about 15 to 1, and now it's 300 to 1. Yep. And so to what extent can we think about a class framework for engendering equality, operating in correspondence with raising the relative position of African-Americans? Yeah. So first of all, I think that that change in the disparity in CEO pay with regular line workers is indicative of the failure of human capital theory. Or unless you want to argue that that differential is attributable entirely to profit sharing. OK, but if you treat it as a wage, then human capital theory is nonsense. OK, so wage is not equal to marginal productivity. I can't imagine anybody claiming a CEO is 300 to 400 times as productive as a line worker. But OK. But that said, the way I've attempted to think about the relationship or interaction between class and social identity grouping is to think about a world in which there are two ladders. And one ladder has a higher base than the other, and it also has a higher apex than the other. And so we can think about individuals from each of these social identity groups having a position along these ladders. And if you think about the intergroup comparison, then individuals on each of these ladders are thinking about how the typical person is doing in each of these groups. But they're also making a comparison about their own position on their own group's ladder with other folks who are on that ladder. And they may, under some circumstances, compare their position on their group's ladder with the potential position that they might hold if they were in the other group. And it's the ladder case in which I try to talk about the foundations for people engaging in acts of passing from the dominant group to the subordinate group. This is kind of the paradoxical form of passing. Rachel Dallazole for those who are trying to think about that. So what are the circumstances in which that occurs? And if you make an argument that there are these two adjacent ladders, but one has a higher base and a higher apex than the other, it becomes possible for some individuals who are in the dominant group to perceive that they might actually have a relatively higher status in the subordinate group in the zone of overlap. And then they may make the decision if they are able to try to pass from high to low. And so that's how I think about it. But I think the ladder metaphor is really very, very useful. And you can think about the ladders shifting their positions, you know, one of them moving further up. One of the things that's critical in all of this is the phenomenon of last place aversion. So as long as the dominant group's ladder has a higher base than the subordinate group's ladder, it ensures that all the members of the dominant group can avoid being in the last place. And so this is sort of the way I've been trying to think about it. I'm not sure that that's dynamic enough for the purposes you have in mind, but that's how I've been trying to work through these. Yeah. Thanks. I have a question. I was struck by your saying that an exploitative economy is not necessarily a badly working economy. And the reason I am asking about this is that one of the ways, as I've been engaging with your work and thinking about stratification economics, I've been thinking a lot about its relationship to understandings of racial capitalism. And I would argue that the claim of racial capitalism is and where one would lead from where your talk was going is that an exploitative economy is consequently a productive economy. That that is what we mean when we say racial capitalism, that the production is primarily via the exploitation. So I'm wondering about the choice that seems to me from just reading your work to be an explicit choice to not choose that framing, to choose the stratification economics framing, which is perhaps less seen as a thing that is racial capitalism that has whatever, a meaning beyond just the phrase stratification economics. I'm wondering if you can talk about that choice to frame the work that way. Yeah, there's a group that I met with, I think Nancy Fulbright is a participant in that group, that's looking at the question of the future of capitalism or something like that. And so I was focusing on this notion that actually there are many elements of the current social order that I would say are non-capitalistic. And that really reflect the rise to dominance of, well, Nancy didn't like my use of this phrase, the rise to dominance of unproductive labor. And she didn't like my use of that phrase because it made it sound like reproductive labor was not productive. But I didn't mean the term in the context of biological reproduction at all. I meant it in the sense that unproductive labor is a labor that does not produce, does not directly produce surplus value, does not directly produce profit, if you will. And so this would include folks like us who are academics, right? We're not productive labor in that sense, okay? And the term unproductive labor doesn't mean that folks are socially unnecessary, okay? But it does mean that we're more likely to be living off of surplus value than we are producing it. And so in that context, I was arguing that we still would be likely to have hierarchical conditions in this so-called post-capitalist society. And as long as we have conditions of hierarchy, it creates an incentive for some social groups to coalesce to create a situation in which they do not have to be subjected to the worst positions in the society and that they potentially could have access to the topmost positions. And so racism and racialization is not, from that perspective, something that is specific to capitalism. So racial, there probably is no other, there's nothing, historically, we've always had racial capitalism, okay, you know, from the point of the transatlantic slave trade and its role in the development of the capitalist system. But the elimination of capitalism does not necessarily mean the elimination of racism, which I link to hierarchy in general. So, yeah. Thank you. Thank you for your talk. Okay. As long as I can remember them, okay. Please help me remember the questions. Okay. Yeah. Your last couple of answers might roll into my question. So before my academic life and previous life, I worked in civil rights in South Side Virginia, including Farmville, and labor organizing in North and South Carolina. And so I'm going to give you an opportunity to knock down one of my last remaining idealistic notions from those days. In the Cone Mills and Burlington Mills efforts to organize, we had the Klan counterpicketing. We had white workers getting up and saying, tearing up their Klan card and saying, they're with a company, I'm with Joe over here, the black worker. And we were very hopeful about building the kind of interracial solidarity that would make it possible to move everyone's interest forward. Now, it's interesting in the textile industry, that latter you're talking about, the jobs were divided in such a way. There was pretty obvious if you looked over here, you didn't want that job. You wanted this job. So that one made it hard. GE Plant in South Carolina, we succeeded because we didn't meet class solidarity across racial lines work. I guess my question as I'm listening to your talk is, is that notion dead? What happened to the idea, I guess, you know, as Frederick Douglass said, you were kept apart that you were separately fleeced from your earnings. You know, the idea that black and white solidarity in the working class could have made a difference in everyone's living. I used to live in Montgomery too, so I know I walked by that swimming pool which is now covered with grass. And there were not subsidies for white kids to go to private pools. They went to the river and probably some drowned. So is that notion dead? My Farmville example is correct, but my swimming pool example isn't. Right. Yeah, I mean, and there are probably other examples we could find where there were no subsidies for all kinds of things that white, lower, on the lower economic level, were not given. But I mean, yeah, you've got a great point. But where would the economy be if labor solidarity had existed? Capitalism had other ways of suppressing the labor movement. But had that succeeded, where would we be? Would we be any different? So I guess my question about what we would have is, what is it we would have had? Is it a society that would have leveled hierarchy? And if it didn't, then there would still be a foundation or a basis for racism to operate. Because essentially what it does is not only does it give a segment of the dominant group disproportionate access to the top, but it also prevents them from having to be at the very bottom. And so they're insulated. So if you think about the black, white unemployment rate gap, the black unemployment rate is always twice as high as the white rate. And it's normal for a society of our type to generate some level of unemployment. So who bears the brunt of having to be in the unemployed category? Well, it's pretty clear. So what would happen in a society that was a product of the efforts of a racially unified group of workers to make change? And I don't know what kind of society would emerge. I would advocate that. But I'm not exactly sure what the ultimate product would be. I mean, I think of all of these instances in which we've been very optimistic. I mean, the Arab Spring. And then we look at what actually evolves. And it's just hard to say. But that's really a key question, is working class solidarity a possibility? And if so, what would be the effects of it? Thank you. Thanks for coming today. Are there any trends within the black community, such as higher crime rates or higher illegitimacy rates that could explain their position vis-a-vis whites in Kansas East Lane by some dominant social group? No. No to the first one or the second one? No to both. So there's no. There's a propagandistic mechanism that's a float about black illegitimacy and black criminality. I guess it depends on what kind of crime you have in mind. If we think about which community in the United States has the highest degree of history of violence, that's unquestionably white Americans. Unquestionably. I mean, I'm not sure if you're aware of the 100 massacres that were conducted between the end of the Civil War and World War II that were directed against black communities throughout the United States in which thousands of blacks were killed and the white terrorists appropriated black-owned property. So there's no segment of the population that has a greater history of violence than white Americans. So when you talk about these kinds of matters to me, you're actually mouthing a set of propagandistic claims that are made on the right in the United States and they do not have a foundation, in fact. All right, so. Sorry, last quick question. You talked about sort of the difference in wage, like black wage being on average below white wage and white wage being sort of on average above the mean. And I kind of want to get back to the couple of questions that have been asked about class, not to harp on class with you. But so from your perspective, what segment of whites is it the white working class, white wage earning class, or the white petite bourgeois or the white bourgeois that has the most to lose from reparations policy? Well, no, I mean, when you say lose again. In relative terms. Well, it could be, yeah, I mean, it depends on what kind of reparations plan it is. So the one that we have in mind that Kirsten Mullin and I have developed is our objective is to make sure that there's not an absolute loss. I don't know if that answers your question. Yeah, but yes, there would have to be a relative change. I mean, if your goal is to say, for example, you want to equalize wealth between blacks and whites, and you do it at the average, you would end up in a situation where black median wealth would be higher than white median wealth, even though mean wealth would be the same between the two groups. If you gave every eligible black American the same amount of money. And so there's no way you could institute a serious reparations plan without altering the relative position of whites. But you could potentially design one so you don't alter their absolute position. The dismal science. Actually, you should look at the etymology of that phrase. On the Negro question, huh? Well, yeah, but it doesn't have anything really to do with pessimism about economics as a field. It has to do with an individual who was actually advocating or making the case for the benefits of slavery. So that was what was dismal about it. Here is the thing. When I first began kind of studying economics of discrimination, one of the books tossed around was Gary Beckers, The Economics of Discrimination. And it's useful to note that his work was regarded as confronting economic effects of discrimination in the marketplace because of race and other non-pecuniary considerations, and that he demonstrated that discrimination in the marketplace by any group reduces their own real incomes as well as those of the minority. Now is that kind of thinking based upon what you were presenting tonight no longer mainstream to use the chair's phrase? Or is there still a dominant portion of economics that sees that way of thinking more so than stratification? That's only a sustainable argument if you assume you have continuous full employment. Yeah. Because what that argument is, it's based on that human capital junk again, that what you're doing is you're reducing total output because there is a segment of your population whose human capital is not being adequately rewarded. But it's tricky because there is another segment of the population that's getting over rewarded. So I'm not even sure Becker's initial formulation is exactly right, but to the extent that you want to say that there's a logical foundation for the argument, you must be assuming there's no unemployment. So it was Becker that led me to conclude that rationality itself is a problem. As a tool of analysis and understanding the world, that it has a limited view, and that doesn't mean just because something isn't rational, it's irrational. I often refer to our identities as non-rational. They're amalgam of rules. So just because it's a rule-based system of if then, doesn't mean it's rational. And the amalgam that we have often has many contradictions and paradoxes look no farther than our own families. So seriously, I think. And then not that I have any better ideas for how this is all going to come out. So one other point was when you said if we increased disadvantaged black income and white income would go down when it fall above or below the mean, the question is, how does economic productivity occur, increase in productivity? And I believe there's plenty of cases that you would show will go above the mean. I absolutely agree that white folks are going to be looking at 1% to 2% and black folks and others. That dichotomy, too, is problematic. It will be above the mean if you look at the. The dichotomy, the bilateral dichotomy is fundamental to the history of this country. Yeah, I agree. And I think that's part of the issue. So I think reparations are not enough. We need preparations, which means that we need a more dynamic picture to prepare the society for and shouldn't slow anything down, but that just giving folks money that was taken from them historically is a good thing. But in the long run, we're going to revert to that other mean unless there are other preparations for how we reorder our society. So I'm a fervent advocate of something that a small number of us have referred to as an economic bill of rights for the 21st century, which would include a federal job guarantee. It would include a guarantee of either national health insurance or a national health service and some other components. So I definitely subscribe to the view that we need a structural change in our society as a whole. But I guess I don't have the view that you necessarily have to do that first, given how long we have delayed on reparations. That's what I meant, no delay. But the concept of belonging, a little of which we understood and that we try to use rationality to describe whether it's rational or irrational, is inadequate. And in stratification economics, I'm taking the notion of group attachment as, I don't know. I hate to use this term. Axiomatic? Yeah. OK. I'm taking that as axiomatic. Then I'm asking what kinds of taste and preferences would people have given that identification? And it's complex because we have cultural multiplicity. I got one last part. We the older, I'm older than you. We the older teaching the young in a changing world. What is it that we're going to be teaching them? Well, of course. OK. We are at the end of our program for tonight.