Thanks June and Bev. This was fascinating.

Getting back to my book, Please read it, or failing that there is a good summary and all graphs and charts at https://www.russellsage.org/publications/documenting-desegregation

What is the matter with Kansas? In my state, Massachusetts, our governor is proposing to reduce the regressive sales tax and increase the progressive income tax and send the money to schools. In the long run, Kansas will be a third world state and Massachusetts will be the western rim of Europe.

The emancipation proclamation was over 100 years old when the Civil Rights Act was passed. I think there is always hope, lots of it, if you take a long term perspective. Even in the depression, the first reaction was fiscal restraint, making a worse depression. It took a while to get to the New Deal.

One story I heard from Bob Kuttner was that Obama was caught by surprise when it looked like he was going to beat Hillary. He had no economic team, and so just got Larry Summers and the rest of the Clinton crowd who had been central to the whole financialization crowd. Bad, bad choices. Bad advice. But the good news is Obama got almost no money from Wall Street this last time around.

Prior to about 1980 this country rewarded CEOs for growing employment and market share. Since the shareholder value movement and the more general financialization of the economy, rewards go for return on investment, so CEOs reduce numerator by investing in financial assets and the denominator by replacing investment in machines and factories with debt based financing. The incentives are perverse to their core.

Yes, when inequality is low there is less to fight over. But inequality is a policy choice. In the US tax policy, collective bargaining law, health policy, minimum wage policy, benefits policy, all encourage the creation of a high inequality society. I don’t think it is an either or, there is some intentional discrimination, lots of subtle, cumulative bias, and a winner take all society. All of them make us a poorer, weaker, less moral society.

I was just talking with a colleague, Nancy Folbre about this yesterday. If Republicans stop campaigning on gender and race, this might make the class distinctions between the parties more clear. It might even get people to mobilize around their their class interest, rather than their gender or racial identity. This might move the small business people away from Republicans,leaving only the big owners and high earners. Ah, but nothing is ever that static!

There are two ways of thinking about class. The most common is the resources associated with the family you are born into. These are the financial and educational resources associated with your parents. There are no gender gaps in class resources. There are race gaps, but class advantaged minorities get to use those class advantages in school and elsewhere.

The other face of class is authority, skill and earnings in the workplace. These are actually easier to change than family class. You just need affirmative action in hiring and promotion, employer provided training and narrowed income inequality. Well not so easy, but we can point to historical examples.

Fifty years ago we had little complexity on the basis of race and gender. Those distinctions were strongly institutionalized and status differences were expected and enforces in all realms. Now the bright lines are blurred and distinctions are contested. Now there are educational and authority variation among women and minorities leading to lots of complexity. My new idea is there are now as many gender (or race) pay gaps as there are workplaces.

The more hierarchy or inequality in a system the stronger the influence of status distinctions and the motive for both in-group and out-group bias.

Two ideas, one about hierachy and one about complexity.

The Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex, not because that was a goal but to derail the passage of the bill. It passed anyway and second wave feminism was born. Political opportunity in this case created a movement, which then changed who went to univeristy of who could become a manager (or lawyer). This will happen again, maybe soon?

I think that most of the private sector and much of government abandoned equal opportunity goals long before the current crisis. So no, I don’t think economic recovery or breaking up the banks, or investing is renewable energy will help. I do think that party competition for women and minority votes will provide the opportunity for political pressure to reassert itself.

Earlier I said rankings are powerful. In law the ranking of law schools have become incredibly perverse. One of the things we find in our research is that when firms screen on observable credentials women and minorities get access to better jobs.

I watch European soccer. There the investigations are into racist slurs by players and fans. I think that in some way the cultural rejection of racism and sexism has progressed further than our ability to do something about them. But someone in leadership taking control and challenging the status quo is always a place to start.

Dearie, you will not be outnumbered. White men’s power over institutions and our imaginations will wane. It is simple demography. To help speed things up, white women in particular are outperforming white men in most educational realms. As firms become more performance driven and use real metrics, not impressionistic biases, I think we will see progress.

Anyone can get the papers at SSRN
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1539162
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1954129

Getting back to the diversity issues, we also have some good evidence that industries that have declining white make employment have greater than expected growth in inequality among workers and executive compensation.

My student Ken-Hou Lin has some very good evidence that among the largest firms that declines in employment, especially blue-collar employment, are tied to share-holder value financial strategies.

I am working on these same issues. In fact, I’ll be at a conference at GW law school Feb 6-7 on Regulation and Financialization, but my paper is about the link to growing inequality.