In case you haven’t seen it already, you should go read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new, lengthy essay, The Case for Reparations. Rather than trying to summarize it, I’ll just post a few of many choice quotes. On the overall argument:

Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.

On how redlining and segregation were about public policy, not just individual preference:

When terrorism ultimately failed, white homeowners simply fled the neighborhood. The traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma—he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived.

On fatherhood, and misplaced criticisms of black family values as the root of social ills:

From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.

I can imagine using this in a variety of undergraduate classes. Both historians and sociologists figure prominently, as Coates addresses the different regimes of oppression that have created and maintained black-white economic inequality (and especially the wealth gap) over the past 400 years, up to the 21st century racial disparities in subprime mortgage lending.

Coates also posted an addendum on his blog, tracing his intellectual journey from opposing to supporting reparations. I was especially interested by Coates’ connecting the current debate about affirmative action to the failure of a conversation about wealth and reparations:

I’m thinking about it with the Supreme Court set to dismantle Affirmative Action. Isn’t the “diversity” argument actually kind of weak? Isn’t the recompensation argument actually much more compelling? Except this was outlawed with Bakke. What I am thinking is right now, at this moment, American institutions (especially its schools) are being asked to answer for the fact that country lacked the courage to do the right thing. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision coming down, in the wake of (what looks like) a second Obama term, we could make a really strong case that now is the time renew a serious discussion about Reparations.

This narrative is a small one in the final piece, but an important one.

The ever brilliant Tressie MC has an excellent follow-up post, further connecting Coates and the push to address wealth inequality to the impossibility of higher ed fixing contemporary racial inequality:

No matter what black college grads do, they are more sensitive than non-blacks to every negative macro labor market trend. They are more likely to be unemployed, underemployed, and hold low quality jobs even when they have STEM degrees. I point out that last bit because apparently STEM will save us all or something.
…
When we allow education to be sold as a fix for wealth inequality, we set a public good up to fail and black folks that do everything “right” to take the blame when it goes “wrong”.

Read it all, if you can. This is what happens when history and sociology get taken seriously in the public sphere, and it’s both wonderful and depressing.* As it should be.

* This quote from Coates’ follow-up post is especially touching:

… I became convinced that an unfortunate swath of popular writers/pundits/intellectuals are deeply ignorant of American history. For the past two years, I’ve been lucky enough to directly interact with a number of historians, anthropologists, economists, and sociologists in the academy. The debates I’ve encountered at Brandeis, Virginia Commonwealth, Yale, Northwestern, Rhodes, and Duke have been some of the most challenging and enlightening since I left Howard University. The difference in tenor between those conversations and the ones I have in the broader world, are disturbing. What is considered to be a “blue period” on this blog, is considered to be a survey course among academics. Which is not to say everyone, or even mostly everyone, agrees with me in the academy. It is to say that I’ve yet to engage a historian or sociologist who’s requested that I not be such a downer. [emphasis added]

Occasionally, I get the idea for a course I’ll probably never teach. This week’s idea is a course on real dystopias. A couple years ago, then-president of the American Sociological Association Erik Olin Wright unveiled a big collaborative project on “real utopias”. Real utopias are actually existing utopic projects, like cooperatives and Creative Commons. This of course inspires a whole mental 2×2 table of real vs. unreal utopias vs. dystopias (for a bit of humor at the time, see this old post). The category that most interests me is not so much Wright’s real utopias, but rather the actually existing, or plausible and predicted, dystopias. And then I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to teach a whole class about these things?

Following from the writing of Warren Ellis and Joshua Ellis, let’s call these “dispatches from the Grim Meathook Future.” Each week or sub-unit would cover a different real dystopia, ideally with a guest lecturer who could speak to the underlying science or politics of the particular kind of dystopia. A lot of them connect to climate change, but that’s almost too broad so we have to disaggregate, and I’ll just focus on one possibility. Here are some example units and ideas for guest lecture topics:

1. Antibiotic resistant infections. Guest lecturers: a historian of medicine to talk about the world before antibiotics, a microbiologists or epidemiologist to talk about the problems of antibiotic resistance, the lack of new antibiotics in development, and the already high prevalence of resistant bugs (e.g.). Here’s an essay from Medium that could serve as a primer.

2. Widespread droughts and massive disruptions of the food supply connected to climate change. Guest lecturers: a social scientist to speak about the current system of water provisioning, agriculture and the wacky politics thereof (e.g. Steve Jackson at Cornell), an environmental scientist to speak about draining of the aquifers, difficulties of desalination, and growing drought conditions in much of the world.

3. The dominance of the patrimonial super-rich. If we believe Thomas Piketty, absent some kind of major political realignment, revolution, or widespread war, the next century will see a continued increase in both income and wealth inequality, and especially the return of a class of super-rich inheritors who will dominate political and social life. Guest lecturers could include a historian or literary scholar to talk about the last gilded age and the cultural dominance of the super rich then, as well as an economist to walk through Piketty’s data and model and/or a political scientist or sociologist to talk about the improbability of enacting policies likely to stem the growing wealth of the super-elite (cf. Gilens and Page).

4. The Player Piano dystopia. In his optimistic vision of the future, outlined in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, Keynes argued that in the future, the economic system would be so productive that most people could live lives of relative leisure, working perhaps 15-hour weeks to share the reduced workload widely and make sure all have some meaningful labor. Kurt Vonnegut offered an alternative vision in his debut novel, Player Piano, in which a relatively small clique of engineers built and maintained the machines, while a large class of unemployed workers lived lives of aimless poverty. Modern version of Vonnegut’s argument focus on the inability of society to come up with ways of distributing resources equitably outside of the labor market. Class could focus on these literary texts, and/or the economics of automation.

5. The Surveillance state dystopia. A nice place to start, because it’s so personal and yet so vivid, might be the recent debates over big data and privacy, such as the story about Target predicting a teen girl’s pregnancy before her parents knew, and the recent (sort-of) follow-up about the lengths sociology professor Janet Vertesi had to go to to prevent automated surveillance systems from sussing out her own pregnancy. From there you could move to literature (Charles Stross’s Halting State, perhaps?), discussions of the NSA, and so on.

What do you think? And what real dystopias – social, political, environmental, etc. – would you want to teach?

Although I’ve been following the broad discussion of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century quite closely, I haven’t really decided where I stand on the book yet. I’m reading it with an interdisciplinary group of social science graduate students, and thus far the economists have had a lot of interesting reactions on technical grounds, while the rest of us are excited about the project but a bit disappointed that Piketty spends a lot more time praising other social sciences than actually engaging with our work.[1] I’m not sure we’ve yet come to any consensus on what it all means.

While pondering the book, and the ongoing discussion it has generated, I had a random thought that I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere and so I thought I’d try it out on you nice folks here. One of Piketty’s central arguments is that we are seeing the return of the “patrimonial capitalism” that dominated for most of the last 200 years. Patrimonial capitalism here means that the economic elite mostly attain their fortunes through inheritance rather than entrepreneurship or innovation. When the returns to capital (r) exceed the real growth rate (g), the rich get richer faster than they tend to spend their money, and faster than new fortunes can be created. These inherited fortunes produce a class of rentiers who dominate politics with all sorts of (mostly implied, but very plausible) negative consequences.

The US looks, at first glance, like a bit of an outlier because the incomes of very high earners (the top 1%, .1%, .01%…) contain a relatively high share of labor income, and not just returns to capital. These incomes are traceable largely to the explosion of executive pay and the ridiculous incomes of top finance employees at hedge funds, investment banks, and the like. This income counts as labor income, although there are good reasons to believe that politics plays as much of a role as, say, marginal productivity in determining the wages of executives and the compensation of hedge fund guys.[2] But, even so, Piketty argues that the US is seeing the same trend towards inheritors having the largest fortunes. As many have pointed out, of the 10 richest Americans, four are Wal-Mart heirs, and two are the Koch brothers, all of whom inherited their money. And when the current crop of top finance employees and CEOs die, their children will join the Kochs and Waltons as next generation’s economic elites.

What interest me about this story, at least for the purpose of this post, is what it means for the dynamics of racial inequality. As far as I can tell, no one has picked up on this angle, perhaps because I’m missing something that complicates the analysis or perhaps because it’s too obvious to be worth highlighting. In general, Piketty and his admirers tend to blur traditional distinctions and focus on the biggest economic cleavages, e.g. “We are the 99%”. And there’s real value to that. But let’s stop for a moment and ask what happens if the US turns into society increasingly dominated by inherited wealth. Families who managed to make their fortunes in the relatively equal era of the 1940s-1970s, or in the increasingly unequal era of the last 30 years, will get to lock in those gains. Families who end this period with little wealth will have few opportunities to make new fortunes (a consequence of the low growth rate, implying little turnover, little economic disruption, etc.).[3]

So which families have the wealth? Well, white families. Not all white families of course, but the racial wealth gap is one of the staggering facts of contemporary inequality. Worse even than racial income gaps, racial wealth gaps have grown tremendously in the past few decades. Here’s a summary of recent research on the topic[4]:

A recent Urban Institute report finds that the racial wealth gap — measured as the difference in wealth accumulated by white Americans and black and Latino Americans — is the largest it has ever been since the Federal Reserve started tracking it. In 1983, for every dollar held by the average black or Latino family, the average white family had five. In the aftermath of the financial meltdown and the Great Recession that figure today has increased to six dollars. The figures for the median post-recession family — a measure less skewed by America’s handful of superrich — are even further apart: in 2010, for every dollar held by the median black or Latino family, the median white family had eight.

This coverage emphasizes the gaps for typical families. My guess is that the gaps at the right tail are even more extreme. Similarly, we know that CEOs of large companies are disproportionately white, with just six of the Fortune 500 companies having a Black CEO, and just eight are Latino – and none of those minority CEOs are among the highest paid.[5] I’m not finding good numbers on employment in investment banking, hedge funds, and the like by race, but those occupations also skew heavily white (if you know of a good source for racial wealth gaps at the very top, or for employment in haute finance by race, please post a link in the comments!).

Put together Piketty’s story on the return of inherited wealth with the current massive racial wealth gaps in the US, and the white dominance of “supermanager” positions that are currently producing new fortunes to be inherited, and we get a recipe for continued economic dominance by (a small group of) white families. Black and latino families didn’t have time to catch up in the era when inequality was decreasing (the mid-20th century), nor in the era when new fortunes could be made (the past few decades), and thus in Piketty’s grim, dystopic future, not only will elites dominate the economic and political sphere, but those elites will be almost entirely white.[6]

I suppose it’s not especially surprising that the future will continue to be dominated by rich white people, but it still seems worth talking about as one of the many consequences of the return of patrimonial capitalism.

[1] Michele Lamont gets a nice shout-out, though!

[2] At a minimum, politics explains why such pay is now taxed so little compared to 30 or 40 years ago. And reducing taxes on high earners increases their wealth in the following years, and thus increases the amount of labor income that turns into wealth and inherited fortunes. See also the elimination of the estate tax.

[3] This is, I think, one of the most questionable predictions. Even if we see low measured growth rates, it’s hard to imagine there being the same kind of stagnation associated with next 50 years that was associated with the pre-19th century economy, or even the relatively slow pace of change of the 1800s. That said, the wealthy may find plenty of ways to weather the storms of economic change in a world of massive disruptions but little overall growth, while labor, as usual, is left to bear risks on its own.

[4] Note, I’ve not studied wealth statistics or wealth gaps nearly as much as income. I’d love suggestions for the best contemporary research on wealth data, apart of course from Piketty and co-author’s work (which cannot see racial disparities due to the limitations of the sources, I believe).

[5] These CEOs are almost all men as well, but that matters a bit less for the analysis of inheritance (though not for other important questions around inequality).

[6] Not to mention the 17th and 18th centuries, but that’s before the modern era of economic growth and etc. where Piketty’s analysis gets interesting.