 Today we are here to see a reading by our own professor Michelle Holder, assistant professor of economics here at John Jay, and she's going to be talking about her book, African American Men and the Labor Market During the Great Recession. She's also going to be in conversation with Dr. William Sandy Darity of Duke University, and she's going to be introduced by her mentor. Correct? Darry Hamilton, what happened? Who is professor of economics and urban policy here in New York City at the New School. Go on up, Darry. Thank you. It is a pleasure to have the honor to introduce Dr. Michelle Holder. It is a pleasure and a source of pride for me. Not only personal pride, but I know that Michelle is a scholar that is having and is going to have an impact on building inclusive economies. So she is exactly the type of scholar that our world needs as we trend towards inequality. But I'm going to be brief because you're going to have an outstanding panel presentation and discussion of two of my favorite people in the world. But let me start by saying that Michelle's research has had influence and has the potential to have great influence on the discourse of structural racial barriers in the distribution of jobs, as well as racially disparate distributional impacts of perhaps well-meaning stimulus policy. So a well-meaning policy could have unintended consequences of exacerbating inequality. And I think Michelle's book leads us to think about some of these issues. In a nutshell, the work in my view provides an understanding how stimulus towards occupation in which blacks are structurally limited may again have this unintended consequence of exacerbating inequality. She demonstrates both creativity and empirical skill in coming up with how to analyze real-world context of the role of policy and distributions. Aside from her work that she's going to talk about today, Michelle is very active in organizations, scholarly organizations like the National Economic Association, which is an organization primarily of black economists, but in organizations which mission has to do with how do we lead to more racially inclusive economies. Her work has breadth. She's a scholar with breadth as well as impact. Those would be two characteristics I've used to describe her. The breadth comes from her experience as well as her academic orientation. Prior to coming to the academy, she has a great deal of real applicable experience that most scholars don't have in the fields of both government and nonprofit organizations. She's worked for organizations like the Community Society Service, Demos, and as well as many other government organizations. Her work has media influence. She's been cited in big publications like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, but she's also active in participating in local organizations like TV Brick, right? Brick TV. I felt that. So just a couple more words. The impact of her work and the breadth of her work as you know and you're going to hear about today deals with occupations, but deals with unionization as well. Something that I found out that I didn't know, but I shouldn't be surprised, is that in 2016 she won the Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award here at John Jay. So not only is she a great scholar, she's a great teacher as well. I'll end on one other note. Well, again, I cannot understate the pleasure I've had in working with Michelle over the years. We work doing a lot of research in the academy. My colleagues can attest to this. There are a lot of positives and a lot of headaches, but at the top of my positives has been my relationship with Michelle when she was at the new school. And I'm again happy that I've had some influence in this work. That's a source of pride for me. But this is not about me, it's about her. And another attribute of hers, which if you work with her, you probably know about. If you don't, you might not know. She's a fantastic mother. And she's a scholar that doesn't put that as an aside. She wears that with a badge of honor as a complete person of who she is. And I think that's what more scholars should do. We need to not just be isolated and thinking about our research as if we're strictly positivists trying to be scientific. We need to understand and be like Michelle and know that our work has impact in people's lives and that we are human and that we have a role to serve both as being enriching our own families, enriching our students, and enriching our community. And nobody else personifies that as much as Michelle, at least as much as Michelle. So with that I will turn it over. Wow. How do I follow that up? We could stop here and I'd be happy, but you didn't come just to hear, Derek. And I would just basically mirror back everything Derek has said. For those folks who are in the back, there are a couple of seats up front. So feel free, don't be shy. You can always come, there's some seats right up front. You don't have to stand. Okay, I see some of my students. So what I was about to say is that similarly, Derek Hamilton is one of my favorite people in the world and I was pleased that he agreed, given his busy schedule, to introduce me. I'm practically in tears from that introduction. He has had a profound impact on my work. He's actually one of the reasons why I followed this avenue of research. And right now I'm basically in Hog Heaven. I'm surrounded by Derek Hamilton and Sandy Darity. As an economist, it can't get any better than that. I know my students are like, what? Because you guys don't know, but these guys are rock stars in the profession. And the fact that they're here to support me means everything. So thank you, Derek. Thank you so much. So let me get into this because I know we have limited time. So yes, this is about the book that I just published. And I just want to go into a little bit of the impetus for the research. And certainly when I'm done, I'm going to have my introduction of Dr. Darity. But I don't want to, you know, spoiler alert. So hang on for that. So the impetus for the research was the following. I'd like you all to take a look at this graph that I prepared. Now for some of you in the back, it may be a little bit difficult to see. So I'll just tell you the big takeaway. If you see the big bar, the third bar, this is a chart depicting unemployment rates by select demographic groups, ostensibly after the recession ended in 2010. And so the groups that I looked at included, of course, black men. I also looked at white men, Asian men, Latino men, black women, all women, and everyone. And so the bar, the third bar that you see in the center is the unemployment rate for black men in 2010. It was 18.4%. Now, mind you, this is after the recession ended. And if this had been the unemployment rate for everyone, right, on average in this country, this would have been considered a depression. So this was the impetus for my research. I thought that an inquiry into what was going on here was important. And I'll also mention that this research pretty much falls squarely within the realm of a subfield of economics called stratification economics, which doctors Darity and Hamilton are pioneers in, and just a little bit about stratification economics. Its specific focus is on group-based inequality between ethnic and racial groups. Stratification economics integrates sociology and economics, and conceives of a world where there is a continuous interplay, often competitive, sometimes collaborative, between groups animated by the collective self-interest of their respective members. So what you're going to see is the manifestation of self-interest in this country during and after the recession. Now, the book itself, I'm not going to necessarily go into all the chapters. There's simply not enough time. What I'm going to focus on is the meat of the book, which is really the third chapter where I talk about what happened to African-American men in terms of occupational shifts during the recession, and I'll go into that a little bit further. So a bit about occupational segregation itself. Now, occupational segregation measures the degree of representation of a group in an occupation, given that group's expected level of representation. The occupational crowding hypothesis posits that the expected level of representation is based on the share of the group with the educational attainment level possessed by the majority of the occupation's workers. Given this hypothesis, black men are over-represented in low-age occupations and under-represented in high-age occupations, even after controlling for education. So the relevance of that is we're all at least disenfranchised groups are told, you know, go get yourself an education. But what this research shows is that education is sometimes not enough and often not enough. Not that it's unimportant, but there are other forces going on which counteract what education can do for disenfranchised groups. So you'll see that. Now the occupational crowding hypothesis indicates that the crowding of black workers into low-age occupations is due to the following reasons. Number one, employers desire not to associate with blacks. Number two, employers' perception that black workers are less productive. And number three, employers fear of reprisal from white customers or employees. Now why am I using this model to look at what happened to black men during the recession in terms of the American workforce? So as Iner and Kane in 1977 noted, labor market discrimination has been traditionally defined as different pay for workers of the same ability. However, as Arrow pointed out, quote, black and white wages for the same job very frequently differed but little. Discrimination mainly took the form of limiting the range of jobs in which blacks were hired at all. And finally, as Patrick Mason indicated, quote, racial job segregation is one of the mechanisms through which racial wage discrimination is maintained in the presence of competitive labor markets. So occupational segregation research attempts to explain persistent labor market disparities as evidenced by racial wage differentials. And the relationship between racial wage differentials and occupational segregation is simply this. High-wage occupations pay more, low-wage occupations pay less. If a certain group is crowded out of high-wage occupations and crowded into low-wage occupations, obviously there are going to be racial differences in terms of wages and compensation between groups. I did want to point out that I do use the term crowding out in this text in my book. And typically the term crowding out in economics refers to the scenario where monetary policy in the form of government investment crowds out private investment. However, wherever I use the similar sounding term, crowding out, it will instead refer to a scenario where black men are crowded out of high-wage and mid-wage occupations and are either being crowded into low-wage occupations or pushed out of the labor market entirely. Now, the economist who actually came up with the hypothesis that I use, the Occupational Crowding Hypothesis, is an economist named Dr. Barbara Bergman who recently passed away. But in 1971 she developed this hypothesis and applied it to what she saw as what was happening in the American labor market, this extreme segregation in the American labor market between blacks and whites. And her methodology was an attempt to control for educational attainment differences recognizing that at the time of her research, which is the late 1960s, early 1970s, blacks and whites were, you know, in this country educational attainment has, for both groups, has increasingly risen. But at that time there, you know, it was not uncommon, right, to find someone with just a high school diploma. And that was all you needed to get a decent job. So at the time she did her research she only looked at those workers who possessed less than a high school diploma or less. She did not look at workers who obtained post-secondary degrees. So in her research the expected share of non-white, and this was the terminology that was used then, it was non-white as opposed to black, the expected share of non-white men in the occupation's examin was based on the percentage of non-white men without a high school diploma. If an occupation had a 10% greater share of black men than expected, then black men were considered to be crowded into that occupation. And similarly if an occupation had less than a 10% expected share of black men, then they were underrepresented in that occupation. Dr. Bergman's model could be represented by the following equation, which would be the sum of EIJ times P superscript NI divided by PI, where E equals the total number of people employed of the Ith educational attainment level and the Jth occupation. PI is the total population at the Ith educational attainment level, and P superscript N subscript I is the total number of non-whites in the population at the Ith educational attainment level. Bergman's occupational crowding model found that of the 29 occupations she analyzed, eight were crowded with non-whites, and 18 had a deficit of non-whites. Now mind you, 29 occupations when I analyzed occupational segregation, I was looking at 500. So over time the American labor force has gotten increasingly specialized. Now a couple of researchers updated and refined Bergman's methodology, and they would include Gibson, Darity, and Myers, and Hamilton, Austin, and Darity. They happen to be here. Hey, yeah, that's right. So these researchers refined Bergman's methodology, and in doing so confirmed that black men are still crowded into low-wage occupations, and they're still underrepresented in the high-wage occupations, even after controlling for education. Gibson, Darity, and Myers, and Hamilton, Austin, and Darity computed occupational crowding indices or scores for black workers. These researchers updated Bergman's approach by examining not only occupations requiring a high school diploma or less, but also occupations requiring higher educational attainment levels. Like Bergman, Hamilton, Austin, and Darity linked occupational segregation and racial wage disparities. Their crowding model might be represented by the following equation. Dr. Darity, I don't know if you may want me to tweak how it's represented, but this is the way I represented it, and this is what I'm going to go with. So BEI divided by LFI, it's the numerator. Denominator is BEAsteric divided by CPAsteric, where BEI, it's all black men employed in occupation I. LFI is the total labor force in occupation I. BEAsteric is all black men who possess the required educational credentials for occupation I, and CPAsteric is the portion of the civilian population who possess the required educational credentials for occupation I. Examining 59 occupations, Gibson, Darity, and Myers found that in Allegheny County in Pittsburgh and in Wayne County in Detroit, black men and women were excluded from high-wage occupations with the exception of public sector managerial jobs. And for those of you who don't know this, African-Americans tend to be overrepresented in the public sector. So that's not surprising that that was the one deviation they found. Hamilton, Austin, and Darity found segregation of black men existed in 87% of all occupations in the U.S., with black men underrepresented in 49% of all occupations, most notably construction, but overrepresented in 38% of all occupations, most notably service jobs. Now, in terms of my research and my take on what they did or my taking the next step with the research, my methodology included the following. I basically employed the same methodology as Hamilton, Austin, and Darity. I looked at all occupations, numbering over 500. As my data sets, I used the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, which will be painfully familiar to students from my 105 class who are in this audience. That's right, American Community Survey. It's going to be on the final for 2005, let's put it in there, for 2005, 2006, and 2010, 2011. And I also made sure to test for statistical significance. This will be painfully familiar to the students in my statistics class who we're going through hypothesis testing now. I tested for statistical significance for changes in the occupational crowding indices over the course of the recession. So, my findings. The table is quite busy. I will just synopsize it for you. Essentially, what I had to do in looking at the occupations was I had to determine which occupations would be considered high-wage, mid-wage and low-wage. For high-wage occupations, I believe the cutoff I used was the 75th percentile wage distribution in the U.S. and for low-wage occupations, I believe the cutoff I used was the 25th percentile of the wage distribution in the U.S. and then everything else were considered to be mid-wage occupations. And so, the takeaways here. What I found over the course of the recession was that the representation of African-American men in high-wage occupations declined. But not only that, it also declined in mid-wage occupations, which I wasn't expecting to find. Also, in terms of their representation, this group's representation in low-wage occupations, what I did not find was a decline... I'm sorry, I did find a decline in their representation in low-wage occupations as well. That told me there wasn't this sort of shifting of African-American men out of high-wage and mid-wage, somehow into low-wage jobs in terms of their representation level. In addition, I found that African-American men are, unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly underrepresented in high-wage occupations. So, that's essentially what this table is telling me and telling you. I also looked at what happened for white non-Hispanic men over the course of the recession, and I pretty much found the opposite scenario, which is the following, that the representation levels of non-Hispanic white men in high-wage, mid-wage, and low-wage occupations did not decline over the course of the recession. It remained pretty stable. So, let me just scroll back up to the first table. I just want to point out this column right here, the percentage point change from 2005-2006 to 2010-2011. This is the change in occupational crowding scores for African-American men during that time period. And what you'll see, these are almost uniformly negative numbers, declines in these major occupations. If we compare this to the table for white non-Hispanic men, you see just about the opposite. For white non-Hispanic men, their representation in high-wage, mid-wage, and low-wage occupations barely budged. Now, these are all statistically significant findings, with a few exceptions, which I note in my book. I note which occupations the changes were not statistically significant and which were. But for the most part, all of these indices, the changes in the indices I found were statistically significant, with a few exceptions. Okay. Oops, pressing the wrong thing. So, aftermath. Now, I looked at where African-American men stood in the American labor market today. But the chart that I have up here is not specific to African-American men. It's specific to the American labor force. What this chart is, it's the labor force participation rate in the U.S. It's declining. And there's an inflection point. And unsurprisingly, that inflection point is the recession. And the reason that I put this chart here is that what is happening writ large in the American labor force is obviously also impacting African-American men. So, when I looked at the crowding indices for African-American men as of 2015, I found the following. I found the results were mixed. While African-American male representation rebounded and even improved for some occupations, almost five years after the recession ended, for other occupations there were declines in representation. And this was the case at all wage levels, low, mid, and high. But also telling me the representation levels by occupation, whether high, mid, or low for African-American men, remain practically unchanged over the course of the eight years since before the start of the recession, occupations in which black men were underrepresented in 2005 and 2006 before the recession were the same occupations in which they were underrepresented in 2014. And this pattern is the same for all occupational groups. So there were no changes with regard to the presence of black men in occupations in this country since prior to the recession, which, you know, that's eight years ago, right? I may be off in my, no, it's more like ten years ago, right? Okay. Now this chart, it has to do with where African-Americans stand because in 2006, 66% of the working age population in the U.S. either had a job or was actively looking for one. But almost ten years later, after the start of the recession, that percent has declined to 63%. Now 3% might not sound like a lot, but we're talking about millions of workers who have left the labor force. So in this country, what we're facing is essentially a lower proportion of people who work. And this is having a disparate impact on African-American men. Okay. Now my conclusion was the following. I keep picking up my pointer. So it does appear that given my research, during the recession, African-American men were not only crowded out of high-wage occupations, but mid-wage occupations as well, but they weren't further crowded into low-wage occupations. So there wasn't a shift. What it seems happened is that black men were simply pushed out and further marginalized in the American workforce. Now this group did attempt, there was an attempt to mitigate the onslaught of job losses during the recession in this regard. What I found in my research is that African-American men, the increase in educational attainment, particularly at the level of an associate's degree, there was a discernible bump up for black men that I didn't see for other groups. So there was clearly an attempt by this group to weather the storm of the recession, but that wasn't enough to do so. So even though the educational attainment level for African-American men, particularly at the level of an associate's degree, increased, it could not mitigate what was happening to them during the Great Recession in the American labor market, which underscores really what Bergman and Doctors Hamilton and Darity found in their research, that education is not the complete insulating factor for this group or for African-Americans in general. So obviously as a professor, I'm never going to say, don't go get your college degree. I'm always going to say that. But for African-Americans, the ability of that tool to lift us up and out is mitigated by other factors, and I would argue discrimination as a main factor. So I did want to point out that this chart, essentially it looks at changes in labor force stats from before the start of the recession to after the end of the recession. And one of the things it points out is that, well, I've already mentioned one, but another thing is this. The largest absolute increase in the unemployment rate before the recession occurred among black men, we know that. I showed that. But also black men were second only to Latino men in the decline in the employment population ratio. That ratio measures the percent of the working age population that actually has a job. Because as my students in my 105 class know, not everyone in the civilian population is working, the civilian working age population. The labor force is a subset of the civilian working age population. But the employment population ratio, it takes into account all of us. It shows the degree of job holding, whereas the labor force participation rate shows the degree of attachment of a group to the labor force. And so for black men, as I said, second only to Latino men, the decline in their job holding was the largest. But the caveat is this, is that Latino men had the highest employment population ratio of all major male and female demographic groups before the start of the recession. So that's a mitigating factor in terms of comparing black men to Latino men and the decline in the employment population ratio. The only, I think I'm running out of time, but I did want to just briefly point out some theories that I dug up regarding, why did this happen? Why this group, right? So a couple of theories that economists have put forth as to what might have occurred. Number one, African-American men are vulnerable in the job market during economic downturns because they tend to be employed in industries more sensitive to economic fluctuations. The second theory I found was that discrimination does occur in the labor market that appears to be specific to economic downturns. But the mechanism by which this happens, whether employers become choosier or feel freer to indulge in discriminatory hiring practices than they otherwise would be, it's not clear what the mechanism is. Perhaps Dr. Darity will address that. And then finally, sorry, Sandy, kicking the ball to you. And then finally, this is a theory that an economist by the name of Sam Myers, well-renowned economist, put forward decades ago. And Michelle Alexander in her book, The New Jim Crow, which I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with. These theories can be boiled down to this, that due to their relatively higher incarceration rate, formally imprisoned African-American men form part of the crucial reserve army of labor that advance capitalist economies need with an especially tenuous attachment to the labor market and are thus more readily expelled during economic downturns. So they form this reservoir that can be pulled in to the economy when times are good, but easily expelled and marginalized and let go when the economy is bad. Finally, I'll say this. Though I've covered the meat of my book, I did want to mention that, the other parts of my book because, hey, I got to sell some books. Just being real. In the book, I also covered some other topics. I do talk about the incarceration rate among African-American men and its impact on unemployment for this group. I also talk about the economic theory of statistical discrimination and its relationship to the killings of black men by law enforcement that we've seen so many of. We've seen it happen live on YouTube. And then finally, I do talk about some policy solutions to address disparate unemployment rates among African-Americans in general. But I'm not going to go into that because that's what Dr. Darity is here for. So allow me to introduce him. Dr. Darity, are you ready? I'm going to introduce you. So that's it for my presentation. Clap, clap, clap. Clap, clap, clap. So I am so grateful and thankful that Dr. William Sandy Darity is here to provide some comments and provide a discussion on this research. He is the Samuel Du Bois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African-American Studies, and Economics, and the director of the Samuel Du Bois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. He has served as the chair of the Department of African and African-American Studies and was the founding director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic and Inquality at Duke. Previously, he served as the director of the Institute of African-American Research, the director of the More Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, and director of the Undergraduate Honors Program in Economics, and director of the Graduate Studies at the University of Montana. I don't know how he does all this, but okay. Dr. Darity's research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling, and the racial achievement gap, north-south theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the industrial revolution, the history of economics and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment. His most recent books are Economics, Economists and Expectations, Micro-Foundations to Makra Applications, and a volume co-edited with Ashwini Deshpandi, titled Boundaries of Clan and Color, Transnational Comparisons of Intergroup Disparity. Both of these books published by Routledge. Dr. Darity has published 12 books and more than 210 articles in professional journals. He recently published an article in The Atlantic on the failure of President Obama to address the significant wealth gap between African-Americans and whites in this country and in the Jacobin, he published an article titled Why We Need a Federal Job Guarantee, along with Dr. Hamilton. I did want to point out that in 2009, the Journal of Pan-African Studies published an article titled The Most Cited Black Scholars in the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities and out of 39 scholars, including the likes of Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Skip Gates, and Angela Davis. Dr. Darity ranked 16th. We're in the presence of greatness. Personally speaking, Dr. Darity has had a profound influence on not just my research, but my career in academia. Dr. Darity was the co-creator of the Diversity Initiative for Tenure and Economics Fellowship Program funded by the National Science Foundation. Dr. Darity Hamilton was in cohort one of this fellowship, and I was lucky enough to be in cohort eight. It was invaluable to me in learning how to navigate the academic world as a black female economist, and the final thing I want to say about Dr. Darity is, and this is for the benefit of my students, Dr. Darity is to economics what Jay-Z is to rap music without the misogyny, the homophobia, and the early self-hating lyrics in his earlier work. That's who this man is. So please give it up for Dr. Darity. I just told Michelle that she's outrageous, and I love it. So I'm especially happy to be here at John Jay College to celebrate Michelle Holder's important contribution, intellectual contribution to what we know about African-American men in the labor market. And John Jay actually is notable to me for a couple of reasons, one serious, and maybe one less serious. In the process of doing work on a book on reparations for African-Americans, I recognize that John Jay himself was actually one of the more admirable signatories of the Declaration of Independence. The list includes some people who I don't have a great deal of admiration for, and I find John Jay to be an exception to that role. But the second reason is because every time I hear the name John Jay College, I think of a song by the Lost Boys called Rene, which I refer to as the hip-hop Teen Angel song, where the tragic character Rene actually was a student at John Jay. So Lost Boys say, Shorty goes to John Jay. So that's always struck me. So Michelle also mentioned the extraordinarily high black male unemployment rate in 2010, close to 20%. And for those of you who are economic historians, you're probably aware that at the height of the Great Depression in the United States, the overall unemployment rate was 25%, which means that one out of every four persons seeking work in the United States could not find work. So for black males, in 2010, it's one out of five. So one might view those as depression-level unemployment rates. But now Michelle suggested that if that same unemployment rate that existed for black males in 2010 applied to the overall economy, we probably would have finally had a major political uprising. But it strikes me that when conditions that affect the black population disproportionately do not affect the general population, that it's not viewed as a crisis that should be treated by some major type of social action or social intervention. I'm thinking in particular about the opioid crisis. So when it was perceived as a crisis just for black people, it was a criminal problem, but now it's a public health issue. So I think the same applies to our thinking about unemployment rates and exposure to joblessness. So Michelle Holder's book is somewhat slim, which is great. But it's slim, but it's powerful. And there's no wasted motion in the book. Everything that's there matters. And so that's really unusual given that it's an academic book. So her focus is on the labor market experiences of black men in the pre- and post-great recession era. And I'm probably going to go over some ground that she covered again. Well, I know I am. But I'd like to tell this narrative about the evolution of a research project and how intimately it is connected to work that I've been doing with Derek Hamilton and some other scholars. So the late Barbara Bergman initiated this approach to thinking about discrimination. Our particular individuals from specific social groups that might be marginalized overrepresented in certain occupations and underrepresented in others, and presumably if they're a group that's subjected to discrimination, they're overrepresented in the less preferred jobs and they're underrepresented in the more preferred jobs. And so she limited her project, as Michelle pointed out, to occupations that required relatively low levels of education for entry. And I think this was because at the time she didn't believe that there were sufficient numbers of black men to actually be eligible for the other positions that had higher educational credential demands. I think that's not necessarily the case, but that's the assumption she worked with at that point. So she finds that black men are underrepresented in the relatively lower paying jobs requiring lower educational credentials and they're underrepresented in those jobs that offer higher pay. So what we might think of, especially in the 1970s as well-paid blue collar employment, you would find a significant pattern of underrepresentation of black males in those jobs. So the next step of this research, well, there probably was some work in between, but nothing of any major significance to extend Bergman's project. The next intervention involved a paper that I wrote in conjunction with Karen Gibson and Samuel Myers Jr. And we departed from Bergman's approach in two different ways. First, we examined the intersection of race and gender. So we tried to examine what was happening to both black and white women as well as black and white men in the labor markets of two cities, Pittsburgh and Detroit. And then the second thing is we introduced a procedure for trying to assess the degree of overcrowding or undercrowding in educational in occupational categories that required higher levels of education. And so we came up with a metric where we examined what the actual educational attainment was for participants in a particular occupational category between the 25th and 90th percentiles of educational attainment levels. So this was somewhat different from what Bergman had done where she had swept away all the occupations that might require a degree higher than a high school diploma. So our findings were, as Michelle pointed out, black men and women were excluded from high wage occupations except in the public sector management arena, regardless of whether or not those occupations demanded or required higher or lower levels of education. The other way to describe the lower education categories of jobs is to describe them, I think, as low-credential occupations. I don't like the description of them as being low-skilled occupations, okay, because I think that in occupational categories where you can enter without a high level of education, you will have to apply a high level of skills. I'm thinking in particular people who are heavy machinery operators. I think that's a highly skilled occupation, but to get into that occupation you don't necessarily have to have a college degree. So the next intervention was some work that Derek Hamilton and I did with Algernon Austin, a 2011 study that examined the distribution of black men in occupations at the national level using the same kind of approach that was developed by Karen Gibson, Sam Meyers, and myself in terms of trying to set up these percentile knockoff points for what the educational requirements were for particular jobs. And here, as Michelle pointed out, we found that black men were segregated in 87 percent of US occupations where they were underrepresented in close to half of them and overrepresented in 38 percent of them and especially overrepresented or over concentrated in service sector jobs that were relatively low paid. So actually the key to the divide between overrepresentation and underrepresentation can be a mark off that's set by the level of pay that's provided by the occupational category. So black men generally as has been repeated a number of times today are over concentrated in lower paid occupations and under concentrated in higher paid occupations and then correspondingly the reverse is the case for white males. So I'd like to come next to what I view as Michelle's central contributions and there are two major ones that I want to highlight. The first is her finding that is suggestive of the idea that discrimination intensifies as black men acquire higher levels of education. So the degree of discrimination that they're confronted with or the pressure to be excluded from occupational categories actually goes up as they become more highly educated and indeed what her work is suggestive of is some notion in jargon that economists use of the endogeneity of discrimination. What do I mean by that? That as an individual's productivity link characteristics change, the degree of discrimination that they're faced with goes up and so there's a sense in which discrimination is not something that's fixed and uniform across all occupational categories or across all levels of educational attainment that there's a variation that's associated with that. So we could argue that in terms of the typical kind of parlance that economists use, if there's a rise or increase in human capital there's a corresponding rise in the degree of discrimination that the individual is faced with, if they're black. In part, this arises out of a motivation on the part of white workers in particular to avoid a convergence in relative racial position and this is linked directly to the way in which we think about issues in doing stratification economics. The second thing that she finds is that discrimination is cyclical and I think that this explains the core finding that she came up with of the declining representation of black men in both high wage and mid wage jobs and then no evidence of any increased representation in the lowest wage jobs over the course of the Great Recession. So during a recession when overall employment falls for all men it looks like white men moved downward into the less preferred or lower paying occupations reducing the black male presence there especially black men are pushed out of all categories of employment in greater proportions than white men. This is a classic demonstration of the old line that described the entry and exit of black workers from the labor market and from employment last in first out. And so I think what Michelle has accomplished is a compelling evidence of that phenomenon. One thing that I might suggest that would be an interesting add on to this particular project is to look at the variation in the total level of employment in each occupational category during the course of the Great Recession. So do we find a greater change in the proportion of black male presence in occupational categories for which they are eligible from an educational standpoint? Do we find a greater change in those occupations which actually have a greater compression in the total number of slots that are available? So I think it would be interesting to look at that and then that would be another way of trying to investigate or explore the movement of white males into the lower paid occupations. And so I think that these are two extremely powerful findings and there are some other findings that emerge in this study that I think need to be objects of further attention and investigation. There's a very, very intriguing finding that Michelle reports about the duration of unemployment in New York City in particular and racial differences in the duration of unemployment and I think it would be fascinating to examine that in the course of thinking about what's happening with respect to occupational over-representation and under-representation in particular categories. And then there's also a really brilliant insight that she has about Silicon Valley and subcontracting and she demonstrates in a very, very sharp fashion that the increased delivery of subcontracts by Silicon Valley firms to black entrepreneurs doesn't necessarily indicate that there's really a positive improvement in their economic position. Finally, I'd like to suggest some new directions or additional directions that Michelle may want to pursue or she may want to encourage her students to pursue. I love having students work on these projects and one of the things I've discovered is you can actually publish papers with undergraduate students and this is very, very nice. Michelle was mentioning my citation experience and how this was measured in some assessment of black scholars but my wife calls me a citation hoe. So I love citations. So the first thing I think should be explored is Kenneth Arrow's claim that racial wage differences are driven exclusively by occupational sorting and not by differential pay within the same occupational categories. I think Arrow is incorrect and I think that we need to go back and re-examine the extent to which wage differentials are attributable to occupational location versus unequal pay for the same work. I think that's something that we should go back and then there's a natural extension Michelle for your work which is to look at the crowding experience of women. In great detail. The other thing is we know that there's this kind of stylized fact about the relationship between black and white unemployment rates in the United States and the stylized fact is generally the black rate is two times as high as the white rate. So the big question that no one has ever answered is why is that the conventional standard ratio. And I'm thinking that there may be a way to get at why that number is exactly that by looking at the relationship between the phenomenon of crowding in particular occupations and this numerical ratio of black-white unemployment rates. So this is another interesting project that might be explored is okay so why is that number always two? I mean is it just a sheer random artifact over time or is there some structural reason that leads that number to typically be two? Then two other things. The relationship between incarceration and crowding I think needs to be explored further. But also a fifth point that I'd like to make is that we might want to think about the reserve army in a slightly different way from the way in which it's proposed by my good friend Sam Meyers and by Michelle Alexander. Because there's another way to think about the position of black laborers that they might not even be included increasingly in the reserve army at all. That is to say they may not be perceived as being needed or necessary. So years ago one of the black journalist Samuel Yete wrote a book called The Choice and a related volume was written by a sociologist named Sidney Wilhelm whose book was called Who Needs the Negro? The essential argument that they were raising is the extent to which blacks are actually perceived as being needed in the American labor market or in American society anymore. What's the classic observation that Jesse Jackson made? We had full employment under slavery? So there's the question of whether or not the persistence of a differential unemployment rate is not exclusively a matter of blacks being pushed into the reserve army, but it may be a matter of blacks being pushed out of the labor force altogether. Now, Michelle said I was supposed to talk about policy. Okay, so I didn't know that, but I'm going to do it. So here's the policy proposal I'm going to make which I think would be essential towards eliminating these types of unemployment differentials although it will not necessarily solve the question of discrimination associated with occupational sorting. But we could get rid of the unemployment rate differential. The way we could do this is by guaranteeing employment through federal job guarantee for all Americans. What this would mean is fairly straightforward that we would establish a permanent and universal program that would give every American a public option for employment comparable to the types of employment that was offered in the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration or by the Civilian Conservation Corps. The jobs would be offered at non-poverty wages and so as a consequence we would create a floor on the level of compensation that would have to be provided by the private sector and we would necessarily drive the unemployment rate to zero because if everybody has a public option for employment then the only people who will not have a job are those who truly don't want to work. And so that's the proposal I'd like to put on the floor for us to consider as a way of trying to get a handle on some of the problems that Michelle has so profoundly described. That's it. So we do have a few minutes left for questions. I don't know if Professor Darity and Professor Holder if you want to come up front both of you. I don't know if we I think that might work best. So occasionally when I'm really excited about a speaker I take the organizers prerogative to ask the first question and I'd really like to do that today. So I've done a little work in political economy myself and of course here at John Jay College of Criminal Justice we're particularly interested in the role of the criminal justice system in essentially controlling the reserve army of labor. So I wanted to touch on the point Professor Darity that you made one of the last points that you made about African-American workers not necessarily even being a member of that group anymore. Do you see evidence that there's some system of clientization that happens at that level now where there's a profit mechanism for taking advantage of non-work essentially with that group? And I'd like to hear both of your perspectives on that. So this is that's a very, very important and tough question. So one way we could think about Blacks having a profit value to someone without actually performing work is by thinking about the process of privatization of incarceration and of course so if Blacks are a surplus population and are not entirely eliminated physically they could be warehouse and this would generate incomes for the institutions and for the individuals who are managing the warehousing process. So that's my first answer. The second answer though is one that would suggest that Blacks might still be part of the reserve army to the extent that individuals who are incarcerated are farmed out as cheap labor. So there's actually two trajectories and they're not exactly the same trajectories but both things are present in the way in which the prison system seems to be operating today. But I was really highlighting what I think of as the first of those two trajectories in terms of my remarks about the surplus labor phenomenon. I concur. Wonderful. Other questions. The advantage to being closest to the front. So I wanted to ask actually because I was thinking about your presentation with someone else who you all know who also has a book out who's a Black woman scholar, Tressie Cotum and she is, we're writing about lower ed is what she calls it and people in having to get jobs during or having to seek education or being pushed to seeking education specifically in for-profit colleges certifications for certain jobs that didn't necessarily need to be certified like you were talking about. And I was wondering the extent to which you think that part of the way your stories interconnect is that not only were people being crowded out of the labor force but they were being crowded into for-profit and low status educational opportunities. Yeah, I think that she was on target with that. And this is actually something both in my life as a professional economist that I started to look at which was this pushing these for-profit, mostly trade type schools where predominantly people of color were being targeted and also you know had to bear the burden of paying for that with student loans, right? So you would take out a student loan, you'd ostensibly supposed to get something that would propel you in the labor market when in fact the types of jobs that you would get afterward would be more low wage less mid-wage jobs. And in addition to that, graduation rates were low so a lot of these students were dropping out. So I think there's a relationship between what happened among African-American men but African-Americans in general and Latinos in terms of trying to insulate themselves during a time where millions of people lost their job. And so I think that these for-profit colleges were opportunistic and I'm glad that some attention was bought to light in terms of what was happening with these for-profit institutions that were essentially selling a bill of goods saddling students with student debt and not really delivering on their promises. The analogy I would draw to that is really Trump University. So I think Tresley's book is the best book I've ever seen on for-profit or proprietary institutions. Actually I think on the back flap of the book there's a comment from me. And the other thing that in the interest of full disclosure Tresley was a student of mine in a summer program at UNC many years ago. So I'm a real fan of the work that she does. I think there's a number of issues here that we're not going to resolve in a minute but one of them is the burden of debt that is carried by folks who have tried to enroll in these for-profit institutions. Second issue is that one of the attractive features of these institutions for many students is that they are not selective. That if you can make arrangements to pay for the educational opportunity then you get in and we're in a world where the selective institutions have all kinds of mechanisms for keeping people out who might have a desire for higher education. Usually they justify this on the basis of some sort of merit standard but I think that's really problematic and so that's what appeals to some people about the for-profit institutions is that you can definitely get in if you can figure out a way to establish the financing. So but that means in turn that there are questions that can be raised about the degree of cachet associated with those diplomas if people actually do finish the diplomas and so this is a very tricky issue in a world where we don't really have open access to higher education across all institutions and so there's the trade-off to some degree. There's also the issue of a companion issue that's associated with these institutions and the sense in which they are actually exploiting or taking advantage of highly motivated people. So one thing that most folks don't know is that actually black folks demonstrate more motivation to get higher educational credentials than white folks. A couple of pieces of evidence to that effect are the following. One, for a given level of household or family income black students will get more degrees and they will take more years of schooling or they will acquire more years of schooling than white students. Second thing is evidence that emerged from a study that Derek Hamilton and I did with Kaizow is the finding that black parents who provide some support for their kids higher education have one-third of the median wealth of white parents who do not provide any support for their kids higher education. So despite all these claims about black oppositionality about education and all that, the evidence doesn't bear it out. And so you have this high level of motivation to acquire higher education but you have these institutions that behave in an exploitative fashion and so they are taking advantage of that high degree of motivation. Good afternoon. I had a question so reading the Michelle Alexander the new Jim Crow she talked a lot about reentry and how the incarcerated individuals had a hard time finding a job so I wanted to know if that played into well I know that plays a role into the occupation segregation but I wanted to know to what extent do you support the band the box initiative and how would you propose for it to become more inclusive of those that are branded with felony convictions and things of that nature. Well I want to take that one quickly because I made a proposal at the very end that would address this issue which is a federal job guarantee and so any individual who is an American citizen would have access to one of these jobs and so it would apply very clearly to people who had completed their sentences and so they would have some assurance that there was a job that they could get coming out of prison. Actually I do have a section in the book that talks about band the box and New York City is one of those municipalities where band the box is now law and I was at the time prior to coming to John Jay part of that movement to get it done in New York City so I think it's incredibly important in terms of leveling the playing field for particularly African Americans and African American men because of this disparate this differential right between African American male incarceration rates and other major male demographic groups so yeah. Let me add that one of the problems is of course that black males are at a significant disadvantage in labor markets regardless of whether or not they have a criminal record so there's the diva pager study that was done in New York and in Milwaukee where she demonstrates that black males without a criminal record actually have lower odds of getting a job call back than white males who do have a criminal record so banding the box is a good idea but it isn't going to solve all the problems and I'm going to dovetail what Dr. Darity just said and point to what he mentioned would fall in the realm of statistical discrimination which is exactly that this pager study showed that white well employers tended to prefer white men with a right conviction against black men without so yeah. Hello. How you doing home girl? I'm good. First thing I did was go out and buy your book. Thank you so much. So listen. Could you just say who you are because you are a John J. Professor here at John J. So I guess I want to challenge this question about the what might be called the final solution or maybe the best solution. Yeah I know. Maybe not the final solution Joe maybe something else call it something else. At least in my lifetime I don't know. But anyway I guess I'll put it in what was suggested as the educational solution versus the ownership solution and what I mean by that we're in American capitalism all right and I guess I have to go to the Marxist analysis here where black folks collectively do not own much of the means of production and therefore we can't really dictate you know this question of discrimination this kind of thing in this racist society and I'm just wondering if you see that's why I call it the final solution whether we need to get to the point where there's significant ownership of production in order to make a difference in terms of the cyclical unemployment employment. I'm gonna give this to Dr. Darity because he's done a lot of work with Dr. Hamilton on what you're talking about Joe is the wealth gap in this country so I'm gonna punt it over to Dr. Darity but the reason I grabbed the mic is because I just want to say for the students in the audience there is a sign-in sheet in the back and I do know including myself some of your professors are giving extra credit for attending so please make sure you sign in in the back so that we know you are here for the incentive work okay so I actually should pass it on to Derek Hamilton but I'll try okay so the first thing is that I would go a step further I'd say blacks don't own the means of production they don't own much of anything in American society if you think about the 100 black enterprise black owned firms in the United States collectively they have one sixteenth of the revenues of Walmart alone okay so you know we aren't talking about much of anything and small African American small businesses essentially that small okay so we also know that the magnitude of the wealth differentials in the United States by race or staggering blacks have approximately one cent for every fifteen to sixteen cents in net worth that are held at the median by whites okay and here's the most striking statistic and maybe one of the most disturbing ones blacks with a college degree have about two thirds of the net worth of whites who never finished high school and none of this can be explained by black profligacy because if you control for household income blacks have a similar savings rate to whites in fact in some income categories the black savings rates slightly higher blacks have a similar rate of return on their assets as whites once you control for household income so the real explanation has to do with the patterns of transfers across generations in the forms of inheritances and gifts I mean that's what really does it and since blacks have been denied wealth accumulation in the past then it makes it extremely difficult to transfer wealth to the next generations okay so now what do we do about it well you're saying that we would have to change the economic condition of blacks to actually have a political impact in the society but the problem is I'm not sure how we change the economic structure with respect to wealth without there already being some form of a political revolution in the first place because the ways in which you would have to do this is through some sort of redistributive mechanism blacks do not have the autonomous capacity to acquire levels of wealth that are comparable to that that is held by whites in the United States financial literacy new kinds of savings behavior blah blah blah none of these things will turn the trick and I've already suggested that educational attainment is not going to turn the trick now supporting black businesses which is so then I would argue that you would have to take one of two steps or take both steps one step is to introduce a program of reparations for African Americans that directly addresses the wealth inequalities that exist in the United States the second is a program that Derek and I have talked about at length which is something we call baby bonds it's not a bond it's actually the provision of an endowment or a trust fund to every newborn infant by the federal government and the amount of this trust fund would vary with respect to the wealth position of the child's family so for a kid born into America's wealthiest families we'd give them a $50 trust fund or $5 trust fund but for kids who were born into the families that are most wealth deprived we would give them a $50 to $60,000 trust fund and we'd guarantee a 1% real rate of interest until the child reaches age of age 18 or adulthood where they could access the fund and so why would this address the racial wealth gap even though it's a universal program it would address the racial wealth gap because blacks are disproportionately crowded into the lower end of the wealth distribution and so there would be more black children who would receive the higher level endowment from the federal government so I mean we're not going to change the racial wealth gap without having some major redistributive program the question is whether or not we can conduct a redistributive program without confiscation and I think we can