Larsons account of the sinking of the lucetania by a german uboat in 1915. Former president jimmy carter reflects on his life and political career in a full life, and david brooks looks at the lives of ten historical figures as examples for how to achieve success. Thats a look at some of the current nonfiction bestsellers according to the New York Times. Many of these authors have or will be appearing on booktv. You can watch them on our web site, booktv. Org. And now a Panel Discussion on economics from the 17th annual harlem book fair in new york. Its next on booktv. [applause] thank you, Max Rodriguez are. My name is rich from columbia university. Its an absolute pleasure to be hereom to introduce the panel tt will launch the harlem book fairs author panels broadcastl on cspan on booktv. The panel is particularly timelp given the crisis that khalil spoke about, but also some staggering numbers about wealth inequality and the race of poverty in the country which should be,th to my mind, a national crisis. Called wealth d finance and post averts america come moderated by my colleague at columbia, Damon Phillips was a professor of business and the codirector at the center of social enterprise. Is the author of shaping jazz, book on the emergent and evolution for the market for recorded just been published in top jobs within management and sociology. We are in good hands your containment, take it away. First of all, thank you rich for your leadership over the years and for the fantastic event. This was a really fun time for me to have this opportunity to moderate this panel. I have really and for me some top scholars and i will introduce them but then well jump into a discussion about the project for the day. I will say a few words in between but really my job is as a moderator is to facilitate the discussion and allow all of us learn from one another but also to get some insight from the fantastic scholars. I will start on the floor in. Its a dalton conley, University Professor at nyu, new york university. He holds appointments in the social department, school of medicine and Wagner School of public service. These written quite a few books and articles. One in particular which will be a focus for today which is being black, living in the red. Next to him is vesla weaver, so its a professor of Political Science and africanamerican studies at the university. Provoked her book is arresting citizenship and democratic consequences of American Crime control. Im assuming that shes probably been feeling a lot of reported increased in the past couple of weeks. And then to my immediate right is william tabb, Professor Emeritus at queens college, economics, Political Science and sociology at the graduate center. Again these are fantastic scholars. I shouldnt of an introduction that span multiple fields of perspective as one of the great opportunity we have therefore this dialogue to learn from one another. I wanted to have a conversation, least have maybe four pieces to although the way to relate to one another id imagine that theyre going to blame. The first is to unpack the title. We have in this title we have wealth, finance, and then postcivil rights america. First we will unpack the. Once we do that i imagine if we havent already we will discuss the relationship between Something Like wealth with education, criminal justice, employment, those things. We also want to make sure to unpack in equality and to think about the intersection between race and class and what that means for understanding how wealth, finance and posts of rights america all together. Finally, we will and by how we think moving forward, what should we think about in terms of the reforms of policy prescriptions. So i was thinking with those, and again you can see how they blend with one another and it also i thought it would be great to take advantage of this opportunity to have you all here to talk about those four types of topics. Let me begin with the first question, the first word of the title, wealth. So first especially in the context of inequality by race what do we mean by wealth . I will start with dalton and then we will go on from there. When the talk about wealth we have a very broad alluvial definition meaning everything from literally how much money have in the bank to your social connections and Cultural Capital but really at least when i analyze wealth, i mean something very specific. Something distinct from income. If we think of income as a check spectrum and every week or every month, its kind of like a stream, if of money, the wealth is your bond and its another term would be net worth. Is simply adding up everything you own that you could sell, that is liquid innocent and paying off all your debt, mortgage, credit card, Student Loans, whatever that number is. For many people its a negative number, we are in the red. For some people its a positive number. In research that now stands over two decades im embarrassed to say, i found that wealth is really e. , testing from income or when someone the job is, is he really key factor in explaining the ongoing continuation of racial inequality and the postcivil rights era. We will get into this more but one of the reasons why i think its an interesting refocusing on a because it will matter when we talk about policy prescriptions. Often in the National Discourse these things come income and wealth, are often, there may be discussions about wealth but not everyone sense of what is being captured and why it matters. One of the things hopefully we can get to it is also a National Discourse around the discussion of what sort of what the research may be saying. The three of you flirt and doing your own work. Before doing that i wanted to get a sense of whether that definition of wealth was one which is consistent with what you, vesla, and william focus on, or are there other aspects you also bring into play speak with i think thats a very good summary of what wealth is. Wealth matters for so many things, including when they get to policy. People of color in this country and all people of color, about 37 of the voting electorate, contribute 1 to financing politics. The Koch Brothers i themselves do quite well and when you think of where the money comes from and then think about the issues that concern ordinary people, political scientist find that your elected representatives basically dont listen to anybody under the top 1 and less would ordinary voters want happens to be what their major contributors what. Otherwise they go with a major contributors. So the lack of wealth for people of color impacts on the policies that they would like to see changed but because they cant by politicians or influence them in the same way. The wealth is crucial in all these ways. Also the accumulation of wealth comes from owning assets that rise in value. One of the things we know about how people accumulate wealth is, major way for most people of his account of their home. The extent to which black people have historically been denied by the u. S. Government as well as bigoted discriminating real estate people and so on, means black people have not accumulator the wealth in the same way. This is not just a matter of past history. Since the collapse of the Financial System from the subprime mortgage debacle, the people who were most affected by the subprime mortgage for people of color. And actually middleclass people of color were the ones who lost the most because as economists look at the situation and also our friends in sociology and Political Science, but they found was the banks and the Mortgage Originators went after people of color, particularly people have been redlined, denied mortgages. The reason there was this change in policy from denying people of color of mortgages of going after them particularly was because the Mortgage Originators sold the mortgages on. They became derivatives, and wall street did all sorts of magic with them which then collapsed. Let the people who sold the mortgages in the first place, they got their money up front and they didnt care. They knew especially for people of color that they would be these defaults. People of color defaulted on their mortgages to a much higher extent than the general population. So the denial of access to accumulating wealth is seen in not Just Real Estate but in education and other things well be talking about. If i could add to that, when i think of wealth, i think of a dynamic property, one that acts often to a protective mechanism. It offers you. It buffers your ability to endure certain social risk, certain economic risk. So most of us throughout our lifetimes will at some point in door losing a home, losing a job, undergoing a divorce, having a loved one fall into economic or financial crisis. Having some sort of, not necessarily catastrophic circumstance, but have an important life circumstance. And wealth is about buffer, that buffer to other types of vulnerabilities. So often the im not an economist i think of it as a living condition. Its something thats going to allow you to in door aspects of life and or aspects of life that regularly happen. And if you dont have it, he will not be able to sort of bounce back. Thank you. This is great because i think its going to lead us to our other discussions about how this starts to connect to the other aspect of society, of being a citizen, we havent yet brought in health care but i think that is also implied by what vesla was just saying. Before we do with them, you spoke about towards the end of prime and subprime mortgage differential, and what some of the banks have not also admitted to have participated in. In terms of finance are there other things that rise to that level of prominence when we think about racial inequality . There are a number, but the general way in which government tries to help people accrue wealth is to give tax benefits of, for instance, the home deduction for your mortgage. Most of the home deduction for mortgages go to the very rich people because theyve got the big houses. So that if you look at the homes of typical people of color, they are going to be much more modest. Many of those people will do the short form and are not itemized. And so thats one area where Government Programs are not helping working people and especially people of color. Others, special treatment of funds that are put away for college education. If you dont have much money, youre not putting extra money into these accounts. You dont have the wealth to do it. All of the programs for retirement, 401 k program. Most of us, not me, im fairly wealthy, but most people dont put money into 401 k s. And when they do that to take it out in those emergencies of illness, divorce and so on. So they dont benefit. So we have a situation where almost all of the programs that the federal government has to build wealth discriminate in impact, if not in intent against people of color. Thank you. So weve had, now i think weve covered both wealth and finance. The last sort of race and that is postcivil rights america in our title. So the question to all of you is two parts. One is how would you characterize postcivil rights America Today . And i imagine that the other part of it which you maybe already thinking, how do we think of postcivil rights america is something which has improved . If i could jump in before you and hard before doing this, is i dont accept those civil rights america. The attack on voting rights, the impact on the rights of people of color, not just in the south but in the midwest now in states that were once very progressive, wisconsin, michigan, states where civil rights was sponsored by those governments, those states, those governors, those legislatures are now taking away rights. Im not comfortable speaking of postcivil rights america. I would be interested to know what you guys think. I agree with that. And i think no serious academic really use that term anymore, other than a strawman sort of category. That it would ask the question of what has changed and what hasnt, right, what is truly different from what is new and what is continuous across our history. A couple of things. That jump out with regard to wealth and income inequality. The first is the rise in income based residential segregation. Most people dont realize this but blacks actually used to live in fairly similar circumstances. Poor blacks lived around wealthy blacks. Today, income segregation has jumped much more up on blacks than among other groups. So that something that is a truly disdain. The second thing i think is maybe distinct, maybe continuous is that the levels even as inequality across racial groups has narrowed, wealth inequality and income inequality among the blacks has grown. Again, most people dont realize this because many of the national outlets, many of the magazines you read in newspapers was a income inequality, the fastest rate of growth in income inequality is among blacks within blacks. So that something that is truly distinct across time. The other aspect is come and she mentioned this in noting the economic power often bleeds into political power. Those two are very connected. One of the things im quite worried about in my own work is what happens when interracial income inequality gets so large that the best off blocks are no longer concerned with the plight of the worse off blocks. We are beginning to see and social service and the like that though allegiance to the racial group is actually quite strong among the wealthiest blacks. When you ask them, do you support welfare, do you support increasing spending on public schools, do you support increase government activism on a host of not explicitly racial issues, their support has waned. It has waned compared to wealthy counterparts back in the 80s. Thats a new political stance and one that i find troubling because it means that the worst off blocks as conditions have deteriorated over time and is Income Growth has not kept pace, have lost crucial coalitional partners in the struggle for class and racebased equality. If they no longer can lean on affluent blacks to help them and to support their policy preferences. We are in a really bad place and we are in a new place politically than we have been pretty used to be that political scientists is come used to puzzle that class variation within the black community did not, did not predict political variation, right . Affluent blacks were supported the same thing that the least off counterparts to get those are think three, there are many more, but three of the biggest i think it changes that we should be troubled by. Before getting to dalton, let me ask a question like this. How can we reconcile, most people this is a surprising type of statistic that how do we reconcile that with the understanding that theres this decline like middleclass . So you talked about sort of inequality between those are the most welloff and those of the lease. We are offering the to decline middleclass t but how do we tae all of that together and understand something of a more coherent kind of story about whats happening . This is for anybody. These are, theres a statistical fact but theres also an heir to the i think evidence around the shrinking black middle class student the middleclass has been hollowed out. The simple answer to that is, ill give you one example. Because were talking about wealth today, if you look at one of our best measures of wealth across longitudinally, back in the 90s exactly 50 , just under 50 of just under half of blacks and latinos had no assets whatsoever, nothing. No dollars to name into a bank account, nothing, no rainy day funds, no retirement account, no assets. Today the exact same proportion is true. Half of blacks have no assets but if you look at the best off blocks, way back in the 90s almost no blacks and latinos had the top wealth, meaning over 250,000 in the bank account. Over 250,000 of assets. Today that number is one in 10. I say that you said that while you have stagnation or kind of spaces at the bottom come hes actions in progress at the top. How we interpret that come we can celebrate the top at least growing marginally, or we can say its a really bad thing that the bottom has sure that as the top has grown. I think that the growing inequality in any slice of, some slice of the populace would look at you are going to see rising inequality. It is not uniquely africanamerican phenomenon. Its a sight of the larger rise of inequality. If we look at, back in 1994 when i was in graduate seminar sitting at a table of race by income, and then showed the wealth love. What blew me away was even at the same level income, you talk about unfiltered 100,000 a year or 50,000 a year or at the poverty line from there was huge gaps in wealth. We hav havent mentioned it at l yet. Over the course of the last 20 years, back in 1984 is the virtue we would have good data for wealth. We cant know for sure how much better or worse it was before the 1960s. But its been pretty stable around 10 cents on the dollar. Typical africanamerican them has onetenth the assets of the meeting or typical white family. Thats a conservative estimate. This is a medium, not an average which eliminates the effect of very, very wealthy people that are disproportionately white that brings up the white average. At some point i think in the 90s it with up to 12 cents on the dollar and pound it since the it varies a lot with the stock market reportremarkable since the financial crisis is a lot of us thought in 2007 inequality had gotten so high that it could reach the same level of 1929 in terms of their share of the top 1 . Theres many measures but thats just one of them. When the crisis happened it seemed like it was almost a natural law, things have gotten too top heavy, theyre going to tip over. I guess expecting history to repeat itself many of us thought that there would be destruction of wealth at the top, that they would be a reduction of inequality just like the ones between 19291931, the greatest drop in inequality in the history of the country which kind of continued at a slower rate through what others have called the great moderation during the middle of the century. But we didnt get fat. We got t. A. R. P. , Toxic Asset Relief Program and other bailouts of the banks and aig, et cetera. And instead inequality has continued to rise and thats reflected also in the black wide gap