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Race Vs. Class At College
David Leonhard found that elite colleges have very little economic diversity. At elite schools, only a little over 10% of the student body comes from families below the median. William Bowen, …was a...
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Affirmative Action and Trayvon Martin
I find Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ writings about racism to be thoughtful and a useful perspective. I was surprised to read how sanguine he is about the Trayvon Martin verdict. I don’t know what we can do...
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Racism and The Achievement Gap
This summer, the entire Bluffton University faculty is reading a Ken Bain book as a focus for meetings about improving our teaching, and it has some sections that are relevant to the Bluffton civic...
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Slavery -> Racism -> Inequality of Opportunity
Last week I visited the National Archives and viewed the original copy of the US Constitution with my family. I was struck by how the original constitution only contained three explicit rights for...
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AP Fires Up Racial Divide
TV news reporter Ty Batemon interviewed me today for a WLIO segment in response to a recent AP article by Hope Yen that has the ridiculous, meaningless headline, “4 in 5 in USA face near-poverty, no...
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Economics of Slavery
There is a little bit of research on slavery that is buried in the back of some economics research by Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman (pdf). The slavery bit alone just floors me. Check out this...
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Is It Harder For Poor Illiterate White Guys Or Rich Black Harvard Law...
Bobby Constantino wrote an amazing story about how hard it was to get arrested as an educated white guy wearing the uniform of the upper-class, a suit and tie. It is well worth reading. He is a hero...
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Lies (or Stupidity), Damned Lies (or Stupidity), and Statistics
A family member who has a history of opposition to efforts to reduce racial discrimination emailed me an article by Paul Sperry entitled, “Eric Holder believes all cops are racists…” Sperry claims...
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Pew Stokes Racial Tensions While Median Wealth Stagnates
Yesterday the Pew Research Center released analysis based on new Fed data that shows that median black net worth is less than it was thirty years ago. Median net worth for whites has grown an average...
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How Americans sabotage welfare programs
Joseph Stromberg wrote an explainer about why the US has worse public transit than any other rich nation in the world despite providing greater subsidies per rider. It isn’t just because the US is...
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Noblesse Oblige
Spiderman has often spoken about the moral principle that power brings responsibility. Clint Hamada CC BY NC This moral principle is rarely taught in moral philosophy , but it is an important idea...
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Racial and gender politics influence Fed governance
The Center for Popular Democracy’s “Fed Up” campaign inspired a letter from Elizabeth Warren and 11 senators and 111 members of the House of Representatives to increase diversity at the Fed. They...
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Artificial intelligence will dominate more and more of society. Will it be...
Brian Resnick explains research that our systems of artificial intelligence have learned to perpetuate racism and sexism just like people do. “Many people think machines are not biased,” Princeton...
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Naming aspirations
If “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” does it matter what names we have? Rafael Cruz thinks so. He is better known by his nickname, Ted Cruz, the 2016 presidential candidate from Texas...
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Median income of black men compared with white men in America
Via Kevin Drum. Presumably this is using personal income. There has been progress towards greater equality in the past half century. The ratio went from 59% up to 73% over this time, but nearly all...
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Many whites are uneasy about becoming a minority in America. It isn’t...
The media tends to use the narrowest racial definitions in order to stoke anxiety because that brings readers, but those definitions are arbitrary and more inclusive racial definitions are more...
View ArticlePrejudice is inefficient and can hurt the people with the prejudices
Inequality due to discrimination is inefficient and can even hurt the people at the top. For example, the slave states were economically backward and although the white elites were rich, they weren’t...
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Black lives matter more in countries with fewer guns. Even most police don’t...
As I’ve written before, I’m not a gun-control advocate because there are lots of other factors that can reduce violence that are more politically feasible. But the Black Lives Matter movement has...
View ArticleRacial progress: compare the riots of 1967 with the riots today. We’ve come a...
Read this classic Esquire essay from 1968. Police brutality was way worse back then. They just massacred people in some cases. White supremacist militias were more dangerous and shot more people....
View ArticleRace Vs. Class At College
David Leonhard found that elite colleges have very little economic diversity. At elite schools, only a little over 10% of the student body comes from families below the median income. William Bowen,...
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