This is a post we publish each Friday with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is relevant and interesting articles we’re highlighting from elsewhere. We won’t be the first to share these articles, but we hope by taking a look back at the whole week, we can put them in context.
Equitable Growth round-up
Today is Juneteenth, the day that commemorates Black Americans’ emancipation from slavery in the United States in 1865. In any given year, this day is typically a celebration of freedom, resilience, and endurance. In 2020, the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth, the day is also a harsh reminder of the inequities that communities of color experience in the United States, as the country and the world face social unrest and protests against systemic racism and police brutality. Liz Hipple, Shanteal Lake, and Maria Monroe pull together eight graphics that highlight the deep economic disparities between Black and White communities, particularly with regard to wages, wealth, and health. These racial divides are all the more significant as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and recession. Hipple, Lake, and Monroe make several evidence-backed policy suggestions that would address the racial inequality so deeply embedded in U.XS. society, the economy, and institutions—including policies focusing on wealth building and closing the racial wealth divide, reversing racist differences in credit options, and addressing racism in the criminal justice system. They also provide a list of scholars to follow for more in-depth reading on these issues.
This week, Heather Boushey—along with former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and Cecilia Rouse, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University—led a group of more than 150 economists urging Congress to pass additional stimulus legislation in the face of the coronavirus recession. Among other demands, the scholars implore legislators to provide continued support for the unemployed, assistance to state and local governments, investments to preserve employer-employee relationships, and aid to stabilize aggregate demand. The group includes two former Fed chairs, four former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisors, and two Nobel laureates, among others.
Brad DeLong highlights several important articles from Equitable Growth and around the web in his latest installment of Worthy Reads.
Links from around the web
Juneteenth’s century-and-a-half history holds a lot of meaning in today’s fight for Black liberation, whether through protests against systemic racism or in calls to abolish or defund the police, writes Fabiola Cineas for Vox. Cineas walks through a history of the holiday, how people have commemorated the day over the years since 1865, and Juneteenth’s particular significance this year “as an opportunity for the United States to come to terms with how slavery continues to affect the lives of all Americans today.” It’s helpful background for those who may not know much about or who misunderstand the holiday—in large part, Cineas explains, because it is not often taught in schools. Perhaps if it were (along with improved teaching of racial oppression in America), the long history of racism and racial inequality in this country would be better understood by more of the U.S. public.
The coronavirus pandemic is ravaging our economy because it was already broken when the recession hit, writes Eric Levitz in New York Magazine. Inequality’s decades-long growth, made possible by policies to diminish the power of unions and lower taxes on the rich, reshaped the economy to be top-heavy and cater to the wealthy—and now, the wealthy aren’t spending their money, which means the economy can’t fully recover. “If more of America’s economic activity were geared toward meeting the needs of the median worker—and less toward serving the whims of the typical banker—then the pandemic-induced collapse in high-end consumption would have brought fewer jobs down with it,” explains Levitz. Likewise, he continues, if wages had been able to keep up with productivity gains, then the economy would have been bigger, with fewer financially vulnerable workers. While the coronavirus would have certainly caused economic difficulties regardless of our economy’s structure, deep and persistent inequality has made the recession worse—and likely will prolong the pain and delay the recovery.
Not only does the coronavirus worsen inequality in the United States, it could also widen the racial wealth divide by expanding the homeownership gap between Black and White Americans. Michelle Singletaryexplores the game-changing effect of owning a home for wealth and financial well-being, particularly for Black families, in The Washington Post. The disparities in homeownership rates began long before the coronavirus arrived on our shores, she writes, due to racist and discriminatory practices in the real estate industry, redlining, and access to credit. But the pandemic is certainly contributing to it. In fact, the rate of black homeownership is near the same level today as it was before anti-discrimination policies in housing came into effect in the 1960s.
1. Although the federal government’s economic spending response to the economic recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic has been large, it is clear that it has been inadequate. It has been inadequate both from an aggregate demand maintenance perspective and from a distributional perspective. More needs to be done. Read Equitable Growth, “More than 150 economists tell Congress: More relief needed to avoid ‘prolonged suffering’ and ‘stunted economic growth’”: “Led by Ben Bernanke, Heather Boushey, and Cecilia Rouse, statement endorsers include two former chairs of the Federal Reserve, four former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers, and two Nobel laureates, among others … More than 150 scholars [endorsed that a] new bill should be commensurate with the nearly 16 trillion nominal output gap our economy faces over the next decade … Americans … are still suffering from the unprecedented public health and economic crises facing the country … and because state and local governments face potentially disastrous budget shortfalls … The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, without further congressional action, the unemployment will be greater than 11 percent at the end of the year … Moreover, Federal Reserve chair Powell has made it clear that families and the economy need help from Congress.”
2. I confess that this was a remarkable surprise to me. Yes, I knew that social power gets turned into economic power, but it had never occurred to me that it would be a big deal with respect to something like the ratio of property tax assessment to market valuation of houses. I will have to rethink a bunch of issues some more. Read Carlos Avenancio and Troup Howard, “Misvaluations in local property tax assessments cause the tax burden to fall more heavily on Black, Latinx homeowners,” in which they write: “Looking within regions where every homeowner theoretically faces the same rate of taxation, we find that minority homeowners nonetheless end up paying a 10 percent to 13 percent higher tax rate on average within the same local property tax jurisdiction. For the median Black or Hispanic homeowner in the United States, this translates to an extra $300 to $400 annually in additional property taxes. In highly minority communities, the extra tax burden can be several times as large … The wedge between assessed values and market values arises in two ways. The first relates to residential segregation within local property tax jurisdictions. Market prices are highly sensitive to local attributes … Local property tax assessments are much less responsive to highly local, neighborhood-level attributes than market prices are … Divergence isn’t driven by attributes of the home itself, such as the number of bedrooms or size of the home. Rather, the difference arises from hyper-local neighborhood-level characteristics, which do affect market prices but are inadequately reflected in assessments … The remaining inequality in tax burden persists within neighborhoods … We argue that this within-neighborhood inequality arises from racial differences in appeals by homeowners about their individual property tax assessment.”
3. I guarantee this will be a good use of your time. Register for the Vision 2020: Structural change Amid the Coronavirus Recession event: “On Thursday, June 25, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth will convene two panels of top economic experts to discuss how current finance, banking, and labor laws and institutions exacerbate economic and racial inequality, and what we can do now to set the stage for strong, stable, and broad-based economic growth in the future … Democratizing the Economy: How financial institutions and the Federal Reserve have exacerbated inequality and why we need new institutions, or drastically reformed ones, to ensure broadly shared growth … Building Power for Workers and Families: How enhanced collective bargaining rights, public benefit and social insurance programs, anti-discrimination protections, and other power-building policies can help Black, Latinx, and other workers emerge stronger from this crisis.”
Worthy reads not from Equitable Growth:
1. Will the economy snapback, and how fast? Three months ago I thought that the coronavirus pandemic would either be quickly stamped out or would roll over the world in a horrific six months with 150 million dead. (We are now, roughly, at perhaps 800,000 dead; and while the virus has been stomped in East Asia and is being stomped in West and Central Europe, it is alive and well and spreading elsewhere.) In either case, I thought the world would then return to normal, save that people’s fevers would be automatically scanned when they boarded planes and trains, and people with respiratory symptoms would be shunned and sent home. But at the current pace of infections it looks as though the time we will spend in at least moderate social distancing will be measured not in months but in years. And we cannot now even guess what the permanent shadow cast by the pandemic will be, or how much poorer and different the global economy will be afterwards. Read Tim Harford, “The economy won’t snap back after Covid-19,” in which he writes: “In the middle of a crisis, it is not always easy to work out what has changed forever, and what will soon fade into history. Has the coronavirus pandemic ushered in the end of the office, the end of the city, the end of air travel, the end of retail and the end of theatre? Or has it merely ruined a lovely spring? … A recession can leave scars that last, even once growth resumes. Good businesses disappear; people who lose jobs can then lose skills, contacts and confidence … Richard Baldwin, author of ‘The Globotics Upheaval,” argues that the world has just run a massive set of experiments in telecommuting. Some have been failures, but the landscape of possibilities has changed. If people can successfully work from home in the suburbs, how long before companies decide they can work from low-wage economies in another time zone? The crisis will also spur automation … There will be scars that last, especially for the young. People who graduate during a recession are at a measurable disadvantage relative to those who are slightly older or younger. The harm is larger for those in disadvantaged groups, such as racial minorities, and it persists for many years. And children can suffer long-term harm when they miss school. Those who lack computers, books, quiet space and parents with the time and confidence to help them study are most vulnerable. Good-quality schooling is supposed to last a lifetime; its absence may be felt for a lifetime, too.”
2. The coronavirus pandemic has, however, given what looks to me to be a five-year boost to the process of telecommuting and the global cloud information infrastructure. It has, quite frankly, been amazing how easily the backbone cloud data storage and bandwidth providers such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit and Amazon.com Inc. have been able to deal with the surge in demand for their businesses. Read Ben Thompson, “Zoom’s Earnings, Zoom & AWS,” in which he writes: “We are 14 years into the public cloud revolution, and the impact is probably still underrated. A company in Zoom’s position previously would not only have been incapable of building out so much capacity so quickly—actually building data centers and filling them with servers takes time!—but would not have done so even if they could have. After all, once you build it, you own it, and what happens if demand drops after the pandemic? Instead, though, Zoom could not only meet demand, but it could in fact generate even more demand (by offering Zoom for free to schools, for example) because its costs were marginal, not fixed … The second remarkable fact is that AWS had the capacity to not only support Zoom in this way, but a whole host of other companies that saw usage explode as companies went remote. There was a lot of talk a few years ago that AWS and Microsoft were overbuilding, but AWS in particular never slowed its spending, and that paid off in a big way during the pandemic.”
3. If the coronavirus cannot be stomped, is it worth incurring a substantial depression in order to simply push cases out six months or a year? Here we have real data: relatively cheap interventions have every promise of pushing the bulk of the caseload out beyond the date at which an effective vaccine is developed, and the disease ceases to be a major threat. Read Solomon Hsiang et al., “The effect of large-scale anti-contagion policies on the COVID-19 pandemic,” in which they write: “Governments around the world are responding to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic with unprecedented policies designed to slow the growth rate of infections. Many actions, such as closing schools and restricting populations to their homes, impose large and visible costs on society, but their benefits cannot be directly observed and are currently understood only through process-based simulations. Here, we compile new data on 1,717 local, regional, and national non-pharmaceutical interventions deployed in the ongoing pandemic across localities in China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France, and the United States. We then apply reduced-form econometric methods, commonly used to measure the effect of policies on economic growth, to empirically evaluate the effect that these anti-contagion policies have had on the growth rate of infections. In the absence of policy actions, we estimate that early infections of COVID-19 exhibit exponential growth rates of roughly 38 percent per day. We find that anti-contagion policies have significantly and substantially slowed this growth. Some policies have different impacts on different populations, but we obtain consistent evidence that the policy packages now deployed are achieving large, beneficial, and measurable health outcomes. We estimate that across these six countries, interventions prevented or delayed on the order of 62 million confirmed cases, corresponding to averting roughly 530 million total infections. These findings may help inform whether or when these policies should be deployed, intensified, or lifted, and they can support decision-making in the other 180+ countries where COVID-19 has been reported.”
A section of the Martin Luther King Jr. Mural at the National Historic Site in Atlanta, GA.
While Juneteenth marks a day of resilience, endurance, and emancipation for Black Americans, this year’s anniversary is also a harsh reminder of the delayed freedom granted in 1865. For many, there is a renewed interest in the day traditionally meant to celebrate freedom, as the country grapples with two viruses eating away at the nation—COVID-19 and White supremacy—both of which underscore the nation’s longstanding history of institutional racism and racial inequality.
The economic disparities between Black and White Americans are prolonged and profound. In observance of Juneteenth, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth is reflecting on the perceived progress made in the lives of Black Americans and highlighting evidenced-backed policy solutions needed to reduce economic racial inequality.
Eight graphics on wages, wealth, and health
Black workers, especially Black female workers, have lower salaries than White workers with similar levels of education. While the median White male worker with a college degree earns $31.25 an hour, the median Black male worker with a college degree only earns only $23.08. This is only $5 more than a White male worker with a high school degree. Some of this wage gap is due to occupational segregation, but the majority of it is “unexplained” and is attributed to discrimination. (See Interactive.)
Black Americans also experience a disparity in intergenerational mobility, or the relationship between their income as an adult and their parents’ income at a similar age. While Latinx and Asian Americans have intergenerational mobility rates converging with those of White Americans, Black and Native Americans do not. One reason for this is that even when raised in high-income families, Black children are far more likely to experience downward mobility. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1
The role of the U.S. criminal justice system in driving downward mobility for Black Americans is strongly hinted at in this research. More research is clearly needed to further our understanding of the economic consequences of our racist criminal justice system.
The Black-White racial wealth divide is even larger than the Black-White income gap. White families have median wealth of $171,000 while Black families have median wealth of only $17,600. Differences in income or education cannot explain this wealth divide between White and Black American families—the net worth of Black families in the top income quintile is only $262,800, which is barely more than half that of White families in the top income quintile. (See Figure 2.)
Figure 2
The Black-White racial wealth divide has not decreased over time, despite Black Americans’ education and income levels improving over time. This again belies arguments that the economic racial inequality that Black Americans experience is due to differences in skills rewarded by the marketplace. (See Figure 3.)
Figure 3
One major contributor to the Black-White racial wealth divide is the systemic policy support for White homeownership and systematic barring of Black homeownership through federal policies that created redlining and the modern mortgage market in the 1930s. These policies have had lingering effects for decades, and despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968 legally barring discrimination in housing, Black homeownership rates have not meaningfully changed. They were further worsened during the mid-2000s housing bubble, when banks gave Black borrowers subprime mortgages evenwhen they had better credit scores than White borrowers. (See Figure 4.)
Figure 4
In addition, even when able to purchase homes, Black and Latinx homeowners face higher property tax burdens. New research from Carlos Avenancio-León of Indiana University Bloomington and Troup Howard of the University of California, Berkeley found that even within regions where every homeowner theoretically faces the same rate of taxation, Black and Latinx homeowners nonetheless end up paying a 10 percent to 13 percent higher tax rate, on average, within the same local property tax jurisdiction. (See Map.)
An issue in its own right, the disproportionate incarceration of Black people is also a contributing factor to economic racial inequality. Time served is time away from the labor market, detrimental to finding and keeping future employment, and penalizes even those found innocent through administrative fines and fees. The dramatic increase in incarceration over recent decades has not been driven by increases in crime but rather by a shift to more punitive sentencing regimes that disproportionately fall on Black and Latinx communities. (See Figure 5.)
Figure 5
The health disparities that Black Americans experience in conditions such as hypertension and inflammation are an example of the limits of an economic framework for understanding racial disparities. Even at similar levels of income and education, Black Americans experience worse health outcomes. One reason is the discrimination and racism experienced daily by Black Americans, which exacts a physical toll that increases the incidence of these types of conditions. (See Figure 6.)
Figure 6
Higher incidence of these types of conditions is already a matter of public health justice. But when paired with the novel coronavirus that turns these pre-existing conditions into acute vulnerabilities, it becomes especially so. Layer on top of this the disproportionate representation of Black workers in jobs where they’re exposed to the coronavirus, the housing they’re constrained to because of the ongoing legacy of redlining and other discriminatory mortgage lending practices, and other structural inequalities, and there now is a perfect storm for a global health pandemic to vastly disproportionately impact Black communities.
Policy solutions
The economic racial inequality facing Black Americans has not improved over time despite rising education levels and a growing national economy. That is because economic racial inequality is due to intentional public policies of discrimination, segregation, and incarceration. Therefore, only structural economic change will be sufficient to address economic racial inequality.
“There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
One group of policy solutions to consider focus on wealth building. Policies that simply ensure workers are being paid fairly and equitably the money they earn is an easy place to start. Possible suggestions include sufficiently funding the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission so it can enforce existing anti-discrimination labor laws and prosecute wage theft, and eliminating the tipped minimum wage, which is racist in origin and was supported along starkly racial lines here in Washington, D.C.
Policies that address the racist differences in credit options—such as postal banking, as recommended by Washington Center for Equitable Growth board member and UC Irvine law professor Mehrsa Baradaran—and reforms to the Community Reinvestment Act are another group. Addressing student debt, which disproportionately burdens Black students as a consequence of the Black-White wealth divide, will also be necessary, either through a progressive approach or even outright cancellation. But, ultimately, centuries of enslavement, institutionalized violence, purposeful exclusion from the White wealth-building policies of the New Deal, and ongoing labor market discrimination—all of which have contributed to the Black-White wealth gap—call for a reparations program on a scale sufficient to address the problem.
Another group of policy solutions focused on addressing the racism of the U.S. criminal justice system would also serve to redirect taxpayer dollars toward public investments that improve economic growth and mobility for Black Americans. Defunding the police would redirect public funds from policing to education, social services, and other pro-social public goods that will boost intergenerational mobility. This would merely reverse the policy choices many cities made decades ago, as Black migrants from the South moved to northern cities as part of the Great Migration, with those cities responding by decreasing public expenditures—except on policing.
We need to enact policies that begin to eradicate economic racial inequality as soon as possible. While our nation made some progress toward making the U.S. economy and society much more equitable since enslaved Black Americans gained their freedom in 1865, the legacy of Jim Crow and the continuing economic racial discrimination so evident in the graphics above shows how much further we have to go. Downward mobility is on the rise, racist policies have not been eradicated, and the racial wealth divide is not only not closing but rather is increasing. It is abundantly clear that we still have much work to do.
A few suggestions on individual scholars to follow for in-depth reading on these issues:
Olubenga Ajilore, senior economist, Center for American Progress
Algernon Austin, senior researcher, NAACP Legal Defense Fund
Carlos Avenancio, assistant professor of finance, Indiana University Bloomington
Nina Banks, associate professor of economics, Bucknell University
Mehrsa Baradaran, professor of law, University of California, Irvine School of Law
Peter Blair, assistant professor of education, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Robynn Cox, assistant professor of social work, University of Southern California
William Darity, Jr., Samuel DuBois Cook professor of public policy, African and African American studies, and economics, and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University
Ellora Derenoncourt, incoming assistant professor, University of California, Berkeley
Dania Francis, assistant professor of economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Darrick Hamilton, executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Ohio State University
Bradley Hardy, associate professor, American University
This is a post we publish each Friday with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is relevant and interesting articles we’re highlighting from elsewhere. We won’t be the first to share these articles, but we hope by taking a look back at the whole week, we can put them in context.
Equitable Growth round-up
Following Equitable Growth’s statement last week on the lack of diversity in the field of economics and our commitment to support more Black scholars, Equitable Growth highlighted important work from our network in the areas of incarceration, police militarization, the economic consequences of racist violence, exclusion, disenfranchisement, and reparations to address the history of oppression of Black Americans. Our colleagues and network of academics and grantees have studied the pervasive role of White supremacy in American society and politics in limiting or destroying economic opportunity for Black communities. We will use this body of work as a starting point from which to be more inclusive in our organization and push for inclusion in the economics profession as a whole. While this is a first step in elevating the research and policy ideas of diverse voices in our field, there is much more to be done.
Equitable Growth’s Amanda Fischer spoke with board member Mehrsa Baradaran in the most recent installment of Equitable Growth in Conversation. Baradaran is a leading scholar on financial services law, and her most recent book looks at the racial wealth divide in the United States. Their discussion ranged from financial inclusion and the role of Black banks in building wealth for Black communities in a segregated economy, to the different standards of responsibility that small and large businesses are held to, and why wealthy people profit off of crises while lower-income communities tend to suffer. They also spoke about the Federal Reserve’s monetary policymaking strategies and several policy ideas to make the economic recovery from the coronavirus recession more equitable.
A new Equitable Growth working paper reveals that misvaluations in local property tax assessments cause the tax burden to fall more heavily on Black and Latinx households. Carlos Avenancio and Troup Howard studied market value estimations using administrative tax data and found that minority households pay 10 percent to 13 percent more in property taxes than their white counterparts living in homes of similar value in the same local property tax jurisdiction. For the median homeowner, this translates to $300 to $400 per year in additional property taxes—a significant burden, especially considering other recent research that shows that nearly 40 percent of Americans say they would struggle to handle a $400 emergency expense.
Earlier this week, Equitable Growth and The Hamilton Project co-hosted a virtual event on the coronavirus recession and the automatic stabilizers that policymakers should put in place to ensure an equitable and quick recovery. The event centered on the six policy ideas proposed in Recession Ready: Fiscal Policies to Stabilize the American Economy—a book Equitable Growth and The Hamilton Project published last year—which would automatically turn on and off depending on specific economic indicators (typically, the unemployment rate). Speakers included U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), former chair of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers Jason Furman (a member of Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee), former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, Equitable Growth CEO and President Heather Boushey, and Jay Shambaugh, director of The Hamilton Project.
Links from around the web
Economics has a race problem, write Dania Francis and Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman in Newsweek. Surveys of those in the profession clearly show that Black economists feel less respected and more socially excluded, and are more likely to not apply for jobs in order to avoid discrimination and harassment. Sixty percent of Black women economists report not only experiencing gender discrimination, but also racial discrimination. And, Francis and Opoku-Agyeman continue, amid widespread protests against police brutality and anti-Black racism in the United States over the past two weeks, non-Black economists have been largely silent—“a function of their inability to confront the anti-Black racism that is embedded throughout every aspect of the discipline.” Francis and Opoku-Agyeman conclude their column with a list of three steps that non-Black individuals and economists can take to address anti-Black racism in the field of economics.
Not only does the economics profession have a race problem, but the assumptions and data that mold economic policy do as well. Racism shapes how economics is taught and practiced, writes Joelle Gamble in Dissent magazine. This means that many economic assumptions—focusing on the aggregate, for instance, instead of breaking data down to get insights about well-being—uphold racist systems by upholding measurements that are based on the economic security of White Americans. A glance at last week’s Employment Situation Report release proves this, as most headlines touted a surprising drop in unemployment while the joblessness rate among Black workers actually increased. Gamble explains how three neoclassical economics assumptions—using aggregate data to measure overall well-being, equating value with price, and considering behavior the result of independent and rational individual preferences—fail to account for racism’s influence in economics data and how racism has manifested itself in norms, institutions, and policies in the industry.
With each week that passes, the coronavirus recession is proving ever more clearly that those workers who lagged behind in the recovery from the past economic downturn are being hit harder during this one. Familiar patterns are reappearing: Black and Latinx workers continue to lose their jobs more often and for longer periods of time and are having more difficulty getting government support, writePatricia Cohen and Ben Casselman in The New York Times—and they have less of a financial cushion thanks to the racial wealth divide. Even owning a business or being self-employed hasn’t protected African Americans from suffering more during the pandemic—and, report Cohen and Casselman, some are concerned that the almost-inevitable cuts coming in state and local government jobs will disproportionately harm Black middle class families as well.
At a June 8 online event sponsored by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and The Brookings Institution’s The Hamilton Project, key policymakers and academics discussed how the coronavirus recession is causing the loss of record numbers of jobs, threatening businesses nationwide, worsening existing racial inequities, and posing stark challenges to state and local governments. The participants presented evidence-based proposals for how the United States can do a better job of shortening and limiting the pain from this and future recessions.
Their proposals, in brief, call for stronger automatic stabilizer programs, which turn on automatically in an economic downturn to help workers, families, businesses, and state and local governments and then turn off when the economy recovers. Rather than waiting for action by Congress, significant changes in economic data—generally, unemployment rates—serve as the triggers for turning the programs on and off. When unemployment rises, the programs turn on. As it falls, they gradually turn off.
The proposals were first encapsulated in Recession Ready. In the book, experts from academia and the policy community proposed six big programmatic ideas for automatic stabilizers, including two entirely new initiatives and four significant improvements to existing programs.
Kicking off the June 8 event, Equitable Growth’s Boushey noted that while it may be too late to enact programs to trigger on at the beginning of this recession, it is not too late to adopt such reforms and have them turn off as the economy recovers. They could then be in place for the next recession, she said.
Boushey spoke to the severity and unequal impact of the current pandemic and resulting recession, noting, “The pain is falling particularly hard on Black and Latinx people, who, as a result of pre-existing racial inequalities—including health disparities, wealth and income divides, and occupational segregation, especially into essential industries—are dying in greater numbers, and their communities are being disproportionately affected.”
She added, “With Congress considering a new round of fiscal relief legislation, there’s an urgent need for concrete, evidence-backed policy proposals that can soften the recession’s blow and begin to address our nation’s racial and economic fissures.” The event focused mainly on extending enhanced Unemployment Insurance benefits and on the critical need for aid to states and localities.
Rep. Beyer, a strong supporter of strengthening automatic stabilizers, recently proposed extending the Unemployment Insurance provisions from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act as long as national and state labor markets are weak. He also released a Joint Economic Committee report on the use of automatic stabilizers to address the coronavirus crisis.
Rep. Beyer emphasized that a critical advantage of automatic stabilizers is that they avert the kind of multiple political battles that occurred during the Great Recession of 2007–2009 that reduced the certainty of continuing support for workers and the economy, and forced trade-offs that weakened the recovery effort. “In the Great Recession,” he said, “they re-upped unemployment insurance 13 different times. That’s 13 political battles between the House and the Senate, needing 60 votes and the president. And the political costs and just the insanity of doing that pushed us toward automatic stabilizers … because you want something that avoids a political fight, that is there when you need it, and isn’t there when you don’t need it.”
Participants pointed out that states and localities are facing a combination of steep declines in revenues and increased spending needs in the wake of the coronavirus recession. The Hamilton Project’s Shambaugh noted that 1.5 million state and local government jobs are already lost and that significant, broad-based aid was provided to states and cities in previous recessions, but not yet during this downturn. “If you look at 2009 through 2012,” he said, “one of the places that was holding back the economy as the recession was officially over but the recovery was slow was the state and local sector not doing the hiring they would normally do and not doing the spending they would normally do.”
Mayor Nutter described how Philadelphia was affected during his first term by the Great Recession, which began as he was taking office. Before Congress approved aid for the cities, he was forced to carry out “massive cutbacks in services” and had to raise taxes numerous times at exactly the wrong time. “This recession,” he added, “seems tougher, harder, deeper, with a greater impact … I don’t get why the federal government doesn’t think they have a role to play in helping cities and states. What’s getting ready to happen is that cities will probably have to raise taxes again on the same citizens who can’t afford it in the first place. That makes no sense whatsoever.”
Most state and local governments have balanced budget requirements that are imposed by state constitutions or by law. “State and local governments, with their balanced budget requirements, are the automatic destabilizers in our economy,” said Rep. Beyer. “Just when we’re taking away all their income through the recession is when they need to be helping people the most.”
Furman, a member of Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee, highlighted research that shows the economic benefits of recession aid to the states. During the Great Recession, Congress and the Obama administration provided different amounts of aid to the states, effectively providing laboratories for research on the impact of funding. “A number of papers have been published showing the differences,” he said. “And they’ve consistently shown that state and local assistance had a significant multiplier—at least $1.70 for each dollar spent. You get not only the additional [Gross Domestic Product] but also whatever the dollar is buying, such as more teachers or more parks or more healthcare.”
Furman described his Recession Readyproposal for providing automatically triggered aid to the states in a recession, co-authored with Matthew Fiedler of The Brookings Institution and Wilson Powell III of Harvard University. Under the plan, the federal government, during a recession, would increase the federal matching rate for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program to avoid state budget cuts. States’ matching rates would vary, depending on their level of unemployment. The program would be designed to offset approximately two-thirds of state budget shortfalls. Like other automatic stabilizers, it would phase out as the economy improved.
Asked what cities need now, Mayor Nutter referred to the nationwide mass protests over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. “You cannot separate the events of the past week or so from the impact of COVID-19 and the even longer-standing overarching issues of racism and discrimination,” he said. “For every measurable sector of society, we see its insufficiencies laid bare by the coronavirus. And without support from the federal government, those who can least afford to pay will face higher taxes and cutbacks in benefits. Decisions will fall on low-income people.”
Furman estimated that failure to provide significant aid to state and local governments to ease the impact of the current recession would delay the economic recovery by as much as a year. Boushey argued that it was in all the states’ interest to support the states that suffer the most in the recession. “Because we are one nation,” she said, “the extent to which some states recover more slowly affects demand across the country. It affects demand for goods and services in other states. So, to the extent we can use that faster recovery in one state to provide support to those workers who aren’t recovering, the whole nation can recover more quickly.”
Authors’ note: We stand in solidarity with all who speak up, all who are hurting, and all who are combating racism and fighting to advance justice. Violence against Black bodies and the repeated loss of Black lives at the hand of the police must stop. We must also put an end to all forms of systemic discrimination that people of color face every day. We will continue to stand against violence and racial injustice in all its forms.
Imagine a town in the United States where residents have agreed to a 1 percent property tax rate. Does the actual rate of taxation depend on which part of town you live in? Is it higher or lower for certain minority racial or ethnic groups than for White homeowners?
In new research, we document large, national inequality in local property tax administration. Looking within regions where every homeowner theoretically faces the same rate of taxation, we find that minority homeowners nonetheless end up paying a 10 percent to 13 percent higher tax rate on average within the same local property tax jurisdiction. For the median Black or Hispanic homeowner in the United States, this translates to an extra $300 to $400 annually in additional property taxes. In highly minority communities, the extra tax burden can be several times as large.
Our research shows this particular inequality arises from a central feature of how property tax bills are calculated. State laws authorizing property taxes make it very clear that the property tax burden homeowners face is intended to be proportional to the market value of their homes. Market values of homes, however, are only observed when a home sells, which happens infrequently. So, property tax bills are based on estimates of market value. This estimate is called a property assessment and is assigned to each home annually for tax purposes by some local official—in most places, by a county assessor. The tax bill that individual homeowners receive is generated by applying the local policy rate to this property assessment.
Consider again the example of a town which has approved a 1 percent property tax. For a home actually worth $200,000, this means the homeowner should pay $2,000 annually. But if that home incorrectly receives an assessment of $300,000, then the homeowner will be billed $3,000—an extra $1,000—even though the home is not actually worth more.
In our paper, “The Assessment Gap: Racial Inequalities in Property Taxation,” we document the national prevelance of misvaluation such as in the scenario described above and show that the result tends to disadvantage minority homeowners. We use extensive administrative data comprising tax records from 118 million residential properties along with market prices from 53 million real-estate transactions to compare property assessments with market value at the only instance in which both values are known: immediately pursuant to a sale.
We compare property assessments done immediately before an arm’s length sale (within the same tax year) with the realized market value of that home. If property taxes are equitable, then the ratio of assessed value and market value should be the same for every group of residents being taxed by the same set of governments (a county, city, and independent school district, for instance).
Our central finding is that the average home’s assessment ratio (assessed value divided by market value) is 10 percent to 13 percent higher for a Black- or Hispanic-owned property than for a White-owned property. This means that Black and Hispanic residents receive higher property tax bills for homes of similar value, resulting in minority residents paying a higher property tax rate for the same set of public goods and services. Our assessment of this dynamic in Philadelphia captures this inequality in property taxes. (See Map 1.)
Map 1
We find that the wedge between assessed values and market values arises in two ways. The first relates to residential segregation within local property tax jurisdictions. Market prices are highly sensitive to local attributes. If a home is located directly next to something that homeowners value—a public park, for instance—then the price of that home will be higher to reflect the desirable location. To maintain property tax equity, the assessment should also take into account this local feature that raises market value, yet we find that local property tax assessments are much less responsive to highly local, neighborhood-level attributes than market prices are.
Our results suggest that when market prices and assessed values disagree, that divergence isn’t driven by attributes of the home itself, such as the number of bedrooms or size of the home. Rather, the difference arises from hyper-local neighborhood-level characteristics, which do affect market prices but are inadequately reflected in assessments.
Why does this spatial mismatch between market values and assessments generate racial and ethnic inequality? It is well known that residential racial sorting in the United States is relatively high. One direct result of this racial segregation is that Black and Hispanic residents live, on average, in different neighborhoods than White residents—even within a single taxing jurisdiction. For a White resident, the average neighborhood amenities tend to push market prices up. So, when assessments don’t track this value, these homes end up undertaxed. In parallel, when Black and Hispanic residents live in areas where local amenities push market prices down, this is also not reflected in property assessments, leading to overtaxation.
This spatial dynamic generates a little more than half of the total inequality in the local property tax burden, amounting to an additional $200 to $275 per year for the median Black or Hispanic resident. We also show that this type of inequality sharply increases with neighborhood demographics, leading residents in highly minority portions of a given taxing region to face effective tax rates up to 25 percent higher than residents living in majority-White neighborhoods within the same region.
The remaining inequality in tax burden persists within neighborhoods. To understand this type of inequality, imagine two homes on the same city block, one owned by a White resident and the other by a Black resident. On average, the Black-owned home will still have a higher assessment relative to market value than the White-owned home. We argue that this within-neighborhood inequality arises from racial differences in appeals by homeowners about their individual property tax assessments.
Homeowners are typically able to contest their property assessment by filing an appeal through some public bureaucratic process. Using data on 3.5 million appeals from Cook County, Illinois, we find that within U.S. Census Bureau block groups (“neighborhoods” ranging from 600 to 3,000 people), Black and Hispanic residents are less likely to appeal their assessment, less likely to succeed once they have filed an appeal, and, even after succeeding, receive a smaller reduction.
Map 2
In our paper, we outline a simple approach for a more equitable administration of local property tax assessments. Recognizing that insufficient responsiveness to highly local geographic variation generates at least half of this particular kind of inequality, we propose tying the growth of property tax assessments to small-geography home price indexes. In the paper, we show that simply using publicly available ZIP code indexes can reduce total inequality in property tax assessments by up to 70 percent.
The optimal implementation would use indexes that are smaller and more carefully calibrated to local characteristics than ZIP codes, as we describe in our paper. But the broader point is that assessors can significantly reduce overtaxation of highly minority communities by adopting a rules-based approach that is highly sensitive to differences between small neighborhoods.
—Carlos Fernando Avenancio-León is an assistant professor of finance at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington. Troup Howard is an assistant professor of finance at the David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah.
Every month the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics releases data on hiring, firing, and other labor market flows from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, better known as JOLTS. Today, the BLS released the latest data for April 2020. This report doesn’t get as much attention as the monthly Employment Situation Report, but it contains useful information about the state of the U.S. labor market. Below are a few key graphs using data from the report.
1.
The quit rate continued to fall in April, declining to 1.4% from 1.8% in March, down from a steady 2.3% in the months prior to the recession.
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As hires reached a low of 3.5 million (since the data began collection in 2000) and openings declined to 5.0 million, the vacancy yield continued to trend downward in April.
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There are more than four unemployed workers for every job opening, as unemployment skyrocketed in April and openings decreased.
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The Beveridge Curve made an unprecedented rightward shift–and at a rapid pace of increase–as unemployment reached its highest level since the Great Depression.
Read “Elevating economic research on racist violence and exclusion in the United States,” in which Equitable Growth writes: “On May 25, 2020, a police officer murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis … one of the most recent murders of Black people either by law enforcement or by civilians who faced no immediate consequences … Ahmaud Arbery … Breonna Taylor … Tony McDade, David McAtee … far too many others… the unacceptable view of the expendability of Black lives … the undeniable harm caused by racism and the persistent damage that is present today … The violence and repression wielded against Black people, often carried out by authorities at all levels of government in the country or implicitly sanctioned by those same authorities, is deployed in order to minimize Black Americans’ political power and economic opportunity … It is impossible to understand our economy, our failure to ensure broad-based growth and stability, and the economic connections to social and political power without addressing these forces in our policy frameworks and policymaking. That’s why the Washington Center for Equitable Growth is elevating key empirical research … on incarceration and police militarization, as well as economic consequences of racist violence, exclusion, and disenfranchisement … Equitable Growth must still do much more.”
A very smart piece from Iona Marinescu. One of the frequent complaints about unemployment insurance is that it is not compatible with job-search incentives. A cash bounty for those losing their jobs no matter whether they get quickly reemployed would eliminate this worry. Read her “Moving from Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation to a job losers’ stimulus program amid the coronavirus recession,” in which she writes: “My proposed policy, the job losers’ stimulus program, is a cash stimulus for workers who have lost their jobs regardless of whether they remain unemployed or find new employment. Compared to only providing higher unemployment benefits to the unemployed, the job losers’ stimulus program boasts the twin benefits of providing greater support to workers who have been most affected by pandemic-related job losses while also modestly increasing overall employment. The exact size of the impact of this new stimulus program is difficult to predict, but a simple policy simulation shows that it could increase the amount of stimulus by 34 percent and allow an additional 6 percent of workers to exit unemployment and return to work within 4 months of losing their jobs.”
I am becoming increasingly skeptical of how much the unemployment rate, as the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey questions are asked and answered, corresponds to the reality of our economy: Read Kate Bahn and Carmen Sanchez Cumming, “Equitable Growth’s Jobs Day Graphs: May 2020 Report Edition,” in which they write: “On June 5th, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data on the U.S. labor market during the month of May. Below are five graphs compiled by Equitable Growth staff highlighting important trends in the data. As the overall unemployment rate declined to 13.3 percent, this was led by a decline in white unemployment from 14.2 percent to 12.4 percent. Meanwhile, Black unemployment increased slightly from 16.7 percent to 16.8 percent and Hispanic unemployment declined from a historic high of 18.9 percent to 17.6 percent … Employment across sectors began to rebound in May, and growth was led by leisure and hospitality after this industry lost nearly half of all employment in the prior month … After the most extreme decline in employment levels in history in April, the prime-age employment rate moved upward in May to 71.4 percent.”
Worthy reads not from Equitable Growth:
I am writing before this event has taken place. But I am extremely confident that it will be—was—very interesting and very useful: Watch “Recession Ready: Fiscal Policy Options to Support Communities and Stabilize the Economy,” on Monday, June 8, 2020 from 2:00-3:00 p.m. EDT: “The Hamilton Project at The Brookings Institution and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth will host a webcast discussing the importance of expanding aid to state and local governments as part of the continued fiscal policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The webcast will begin with a fireside chat with Rep. Don Beyer, vice chair of the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, and Heather Boushey of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. The webcast will also include a roundtable discussion between Jason Furman of Harvard University, former Mayor of Philadelphia Michael Nutter, and Jay Shambaugh of The Hamilton Project. The webcast will coincide with the one year anniversary of the release of The Hamilton Project and Washington Center for Equitable Growth book Recession Ready: Fiscal Policies to Stabilize the American Economy.
On May 25, 2020, a police officer murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This public killing was one of the most recent murders of Black people either by law enforcement or by civilians who faced no immediate consequences for their actions. Earlier in the month, the two men who shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man out for a run in Georgia, were finally arrested for the February shooting, but only after national attention and sustained public outrage. The case of Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician murdered by police in Louisville, Kentucky as she lay in her own bed, similarly took months to gain national attention. These and so many other tragedies—the lost lives of Tony McDade, David McAtee, and far too many others—underscore the unacceptable view of the expendability of Black lives, and have sparked days of protests, uprisings, and civil resistance across the United States.
To understand the present moment, decades of research demonstrates the undeniable harm caused by racism and the persistent damage that is present today. The Kerner Commission was assembled in 1967 to investigate the causes of uprisings at that time and issued its final report in early 1968. This report had its own flaws and shortcomings, as many researchers detailed on its 50th anniversary, such as failing to capture the institutionalized mechanisms of racism, its silence on White rage, the invisibility of Black women, and the lack of Black technical staff involved in the research itself. The report, however, directly identified White racism as the underlying cause of the uprisings of the 1960s and described specific practices, such as police brutality, directly contributing to the unrest. Yet many of the disparities discussed in the report remain the same or are even worse today due to the choices and neglect of policymakers over the intervening five decades.
The violence and repression wielded against Black people, often carried out by authorities at all levels of government in the country or implicitly sanctioned by those same authorities, is deployed in order to minimize Black Americans’ political power and economic opportunity. It is older than the United States itself, enshrined in the founding charters of the original 13 colonies, and it has thrived in southern as well as northern states, in cities and suburbs, and in rural areas. Segregation, mass incarceration, and wealth-stripping practices—all variations of racialized control over Black people deployed in the service of White dominance—also have intergenerational effects, constraining opportunity for later generations.
It is impossible to understand our economy, our failure to ensure broad-based growth and stability, and the economic connections to social and political power without addressing these forces in our policy frameworks and policymaking. That’s why the Washington Center for Equitable Growth is elevating key empirical research from our network of academics and grantees, along with other researchers. We focus here on incarceration and police militarization, as well as economic consequences of racist violence, exclusion, and disenfranchisement. This list is not exhaustive, but it highlights some of the important work that examines the pervasive role of White supremacy in limiting and destroying economic opportunity for Black communities in order to anchor this framing in future research and policy solutions.
Equitable Growth would be remiss not to mention the work of the National Economic Association, founded in 1969 as the Council of Black Economists. NEA has led decades of work that both elevates the professional careers of Black economists and exposes the structural mechanisms of U.S. racial inequality and oppression. Through all of this work, it is clear that the legacy and continued presence of structural racism distorts economic stability and growth through many channels, in ways both direct and subtle. And it makes clear that sweeping policy solutions, such as reparations, will be necessary to center racial justice in an economic agenda.
Equitable Growth must still do much more to address the ongoing forces and effects of our country’s deep and systemic racism, including within our organization and our profession. The racial inequities built into the foundation of our economic system will continue to block and constrict the pathways to economic growth and stability unless we do the work to identify them, name them, and address them. Going forward, we will continue to fund and elevate research that places Black lives and the role of race and power at the center of the analysis, based on cutting-edge research, with policymakers and the media.
Research byLisa Cook, a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Research Advisory Board and an economist at Michigan State University, shows how hate-related violence against African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries significantly harmed economic activity and innovation. Cook finds that ethnic and political violence and segregation laws between 1870 and 1940 led to 1,100 fewer patents among African American inventors during this time period, with this lost output equivalent to a medium-sized European country.
Further research by Cook—along with grantee Trevon Logan, the Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished professor of economics at The Ohio State University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and John Parman, the Paul R. Verkuil Distinguished associate professor of economics at the College of William and Mary and the National Bureau of Economic Research—also explores the relationship between interracial violence and residential segregation. The authors find that segregation doubled between 1880 and 1940, and was especially high in the South. They also find that more segregated areas saw higher levels of interracial violence, specifically lynching: “Past lynching activity predicts the outflow of the Black migrants from a county but not the segregation of the remaining Black households.”
Additional recent research by Logan examines the effect that Black enfranchisement and political representation had on public finance during Reconstruction, immediately after the Civil War. He finds that “an additional Black official increased per capita county tax revenue by $0.20, more than an hour’s wage at the time,” and the effect disappeared when Black officials were removed from office later in the century. The presence of Black public officials, who generally prioritized public education and land redistribution, also led to increased tenant farming and decreased sharecropping, as well as higher literacy rates among Black men—improving economic outcomes and economic opportunity for Black communities.
Identifying and measuring the specific impacts of racism can be a challenge, but economic tools can help bring them to light. Jhacova Williams, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, uses the presence of streets named after Confederate generals as a proxy for racial animus in a recent working paper. Her analysis shows worse labor market outcomes for Black people living in areas with Confederate-named streets and suggests that this labor market penalty could be due to persistent racial resentment in these areas.
Grantee Ellora Derenoncourt of Princeton University examines how cities changed in response to the influx of Black families during the Great Migration out of the South between 1940 and 1970, finding that destination cities changed in ways that reduced the economic opportunities available to children, especially Black children. As Black families moved in, seeking safety and economic opportunity, White families withdrew to the suburbs, and public expenditures in those increasingly segregated cities fell—with the exception of spending on policing, which rose. Derenoncourt’s analysis shows that these changes explain 27 percent of the region’s present-day racial gap in upward mobility, with the greatest effects on Black men.
As this research shows, outcomes for Black residents in northern states are often very poor compared to those of White residents, and the gaps for Minnesota—the place of George Floyd’s murder—are particularly large compared with other states. Former National Economics Association President and University of Minnesota economist Samuel Myers Jr. coined the term “the Minnesota Paradox” to describe these extreme racial inequities in income and relative greater opportunity for Black residents in Minnesota. Myers identifies the source of these gaps in compounding intergenerational inequities around wealth and opportunity, such as homeownership and access to bank loans, which continue to constrain Black communities’ economic well-being.
Equitable Growth grantee Robynn Cox, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work, explores the intersection of crime, incarceration, and employment. She begins by examining the rise of incarceration, which was driven by policy changes and not individual behavior, and how it has affected the labor market and future outcomes for young Black men. Cox’s analysis then examines the potential implications of the Great Recession on unemployment and incarceration, as unemployment for Black youth reached 40.8 percent in September 2009: Incarceration widened racial employment gaps even as a lack of employment raises the likelihood of criminal involvement and incarceration. She argues for shifting public investments from incarceration to youth outcomes in light of not only the threat of incarceration but also persistent discrimination in the labor market.
In a Vision 2020 essay on race and criminal justice, Cox further explores many of the changes in federal crime-control policies that have contributed to today’s racial disparities in incarceration and offers several policy recommendations. Among other key points, she calls for solutions that address structural barriers and calls for a federal audit of crime-control programs and policies “to understand their impact on historically marginalized groups … and then defund programs that inadvertently lead to greater net social harm, that increase racial disparities, or that have a disproportionate burden on historically marginalized communities.”
Research Associate Khaing Zaw of Duke University, economist Darrick Hamilton, the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University and a Equitable Growth grantee, and grantee William Darity Jr., the Samuel DuBois Cook professor of public policy, African and African American studies, and economics at Duke University and an Equitable Growth Research Advisory Board member, used data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth to study the connection between racial disparities in wealth and incarceration. The three co-authors find that Black men were consistently most likely to experience incarceration at some point in life at every level of wealth. People with less wealth were more likely to be incarcerated than those with higher levels of wealth and experiencing incarceration had severe impacts on later wealth, but in ways that compounded overall racial wealth gaps. For Black men and women, possessing even relatively small amounts of wealth ($2,000) in their 20s and 30s could dramatically reduce the odds of becoming incarcerated in the short term. At the same time, White people who had been incarcerated had even greater wealth than Black people who had never been incarcerated.
Broad legal protections for law enforcement, such as qualified immunity and various state laws, may increase police misconduct. In addition, many police unions have also worked to create processes that shield officers from accountability. A working paper at the University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics by Dhammika Dharmapala, Richard McAdams, and John Rappaport of the University of Chicago Law School suggests that collective bargaining rights for sheriffs’ offices increased the number of violent incidents of misconduct by those offices.
Police militarization is correlated with residential segregation. Research by Gbenga Ajilore, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress, finds that counties with larger relative African American populations are less likely to acquire mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, which were developed to withstand improvised explosive devices in Iraq. At the same time, counties with greater residential segregation are more likely to have such militarized vehicles.
The broad research reviewed here demonstrates the link between anti-Black racism and White supremacy, policing and incarceration, and racial economic inequality. Reparations have been proposed as a measure to address the history of state-sanctioned violence and oppression of Black Americans. Vision 2020 author Dania Francis, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Boston, explores what it would take to institute a reparations program in the United States. She discusses the logistical questions of eligibility, financing, and the amount and form reparations could take, depending on the goals of the program. “In this way,” Francis concludes, “centuries spent by African Americans not sharing in the full fruits of phenomenal U.S. economic growth over the course of the past 400 years can be addressed, so that they can more fully contribute to and accrue the full benefits of living in the world’s wealthiest nation in history.”
