05: What economic historians can tell us about race problems?

Welcome to The American Ingredient, a podcast that examines grace in American society from
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an academic perspective, focusing on the work from social scientists and legal scholars. The
American regent demonstrates that race is not the only ingredient in making America. But in order
to make America, you need to heaping spoonfuls.
Even though much of the work in the social sciences examines contemporary problems and events, there’s an
ever growing number of social scientists who have turned to events in the past to help explain
many of the current issues we face. These scholars have looked to history to test theories
about contemporary issues, but also to shed new light on historical events.
In this episode, I talk to Professor Van de Logan, the heysel SAE Young
Bourg, distinguished professor of economics at the Ohio State University.
As an economic historian, Professor Logan used the theories and tools of the economics discipline
to illuminate the black experience and correct several misconceptions. My conversation
with Professor Logan focuses on his work regarding the effectiveness of black elected officials during Reconstruction,
along with his work on trends and black names. We begin the episode with Professor Logan discussing
what it means to be an economic historian. I think economic
history is somewhat hard to define. And even when I teach economic history
courses, I always spend a section about a week to say what is economic history? I think
there are a lot of different perspectives that people have on what economic history is. So some people
think that economic history is the ability to test economic
models. Using history is essentially a laboratory to test economic theories.
And other people think that economic history is quantifying and
estimating relationships that have been assumed to exist from the historical narrative.
And still others view it as really a combination of quantitative techniques
and narrative evidence to tell stories from the historical past.
I think all three of those are valid definitions of economic history, and I think what we
see in the field is a movement more from one to the other. I think the current
model that’s in vogue is to view history as a laboratory, to test economic
theory that has advantages and disadvantages relative to the other two
approaches. But I think that is what perhaps the majority of economic stories would say
they are doing today. All right. Where would you place your soul in this regard?
I think I’m probably someone who does a little bit more of the third, which is to use quantitative
evidence and narrative evidence to try to uncover stories
from the American past. I think one, I think it’s rather limited to think that
history should respond to or be put into the service of economic theory.
Incomes today, especially when we consider the relatively homogeneous nature of people
who make up the economics profession and particularly those who contribute new economic
theory. So we have to provide a bit more context
if we’re going to do something more original than that. And I think actually add
a little bit more more value. I think the scope should be a little bit larger. So that’s what I tried to do
my work. Okay. In your work, you focus on the 19th century and this
latest project you have focuses on the effectiveness of black politicians during Reconstruction.
Can you tell us more about that? Yes. So this project is an offshoot of some work. I’ve been sort
of stuck on 19th century for a while now and really considering racial issues in the 19th
century. And it’s taking me to a lot of different directions, doing work on segregation, doing work on black
names, doing work on antebellum slave marriage patterns,
doing work now on intergenerational mobility and segregation, doing
work now on public accommodations. And the black politicians
sort of fell into my lap as something that’s been missing. And I was shocked when I first
began thinking about the effect that black politicians could have had on public finance and on the provision
of public goods, that this was really an unexplored topic in economic
history. We have a lot of literature on the slave economy and the antebellum
era from both economic historians and I would say traditional historians,
especially those now concerned with the history of capitalism. And we have a lot of work on the Jim Crow
era. So say post 1890 on In the South and then a lot of work on Great Migration,
etc. But you know, 1865 to 1880 in particular,
maybe up to 1890, relatively unexplored areas in economic history
for whatever reason. And when I first started in this area, I just really want to answer the
very basic question. You know, we do have these issues of who the politicians do. And then I was really
interested in what do black politicians do and starting down that road and then realizing that I could
actually attempt to estimate that relationship as best that we could of the causal effect of black
politicians on public finance at really a critical time in this nation’s history. And
I think people now are talking about reconstruction in a way that I’ve been thinking about for the
last, say, five to seven years since I’ve been, you know, really getting started on this project.
And so it’s interesting to see now, particularly the dynamics of the last presidential election, people really thinking about
racial politics and people thinking about black officeholders and people thinking about public
attitudes towards black politicians. Those were much more salient in
the reconstruction era. And so reading those histories and seeing these things happen again,
as somebody would say, it’s happened again for the first time in American politics, made me think
that we really needed to establish the record for these politicians quantitatively to
honestly rehabilitate them in the historical narrative. It is a nurse that you talk about rehabilitating
them in the historical narrative. How do you believe they’ve been treated in historical narrative?
It’s changed over time, but it has not been quantified. So one of the first
things we know is if you’re coming out of the Dunning tradition. So Dunning was really one of the first histories
of reconstruction that we have, very similar for those who are historians,
similar to Phillips sort of in the antebellum economy. And
Dunning viewed Reconstruction as a failure. And I think for the majority of the scholarship
since Dunning, although it’s recently certainly been overturned, people view reconstruction
as a failure. Now, the daunting Professor Logan is referring to is William Archibald Dunning,
an American historian and political scientist whose work on reconstruction dominated how scholars
interpreted it during the early part of the 20th century. Dunning and his followers argued
that black and franchise was a failure and that black politicians elected during this period
were either corrupt or incompetent. And that’s been over. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation
reflects the sentiment in a scene where he paints black legislators as corrupt and free blacks as
preying on white women. The film Furber goes on to paint the Klu Klux Klan as the saviors
of the South by chasing out these corrupt officials. Dunn and Eric Foner. Historian,
who is a strong critic of the Dunning school, argues that Dunning’s work help justify Jim Crow
and protected the South from criticisms of taking the vote away from blacks. One scholar,
such as W.E.B. Dubois and Frequent Frazier, were critical in mounting a rebuttal of Dunning
and his followers, arguing that the failure of reconstruction was not the incompetence of black elected officials,
but the federal government’s lack of commitment to racial equality. In his classic work,
Black Reconstruction, Dubois notes that the empowerment during reconstruction provided
great promise and its demise was a tragic defeat for democracy.
Now we construction did not achieve its goals. But the reasons for that were very different, safer
coming out of the dining tradition. And the reasons were that it was not meant for the South. We
shouldn’t have had enfranchisement of African-Americans. We certainly shouldn’t have had political
representation by African-Americans and that this was the reason. For that
failure that’s been overturned. So starting with the voice in black reconstruction,
we know that black politicians were active. They were not all corrupt and an unfit for
office, but we went and have developed that. But it hasn’t
been quantified their effectiveness and what they’ve actually done and whether they were effective or
more effective than other politicians. So what have you found in your examination of black politicians
during this time period suffering that they have really large effects in a couple of different ways?
One effect is I found that they have a large causal effect on the provision of public goods. So we
do see larger tax revenues in places where they’re holding
office in a very sizable affects of that. And then we have to wonder, do these taxes do anything other than
just raise taxes? And I find really large effects on school and woman from a black and white students.
But in particular, human capital acquisition for four African-Americans and a closing of the literacy
gap between blacks and whites in areas where black politicians were serving in office.
Okay. So in regards to taxes, how exactly are the taxes
taking shape in order to raise revenue to provide these resources? So taxes at the county
level historically were largely coming from two sources. One is
taxes on land and property taxes and other real assets. The second
you had some excise taxes, but very, very smart at the county level. This second were poll taxes
that were a significant source of local local revenue. And I can’t
disentangle between the very different effects of that is idiosyncratic and lost to us in the historical
record. But I do find substantial increases in even controlling for land
values. You know, you do find larger tax receipts in those areas and controlling the population to a larger tax
rates probably have been the mechanism for for having larger receipts.
Now you’ve talked about the response to black politicians. How would you describe
the response to black politicians doing reconstruction? Whereas you think of them as providing more resources,
but they’re also collecting more resources. So how should we understand the nature
of the relationship between black politicians or reconstruction and their
black and white constituents? I think the issue is what level of constituent service you providing
and to what constituents who are providing that service. So taxes are redistributive
and that’s what taxes do. Taxes are redistributed, at least
in the American sense, or most taxes are redistributed. Some taxes are regressive. But these taxes
would have been redistributed tax. Just a quick note for clarification. A regressive tax. The tax applied
uniformly, taking a larger percentage of income from low income earners,
then from high income earners. A regressive tax is an opposition to a progressive
tax, which takes a larger percentage from higher income earners. How do examples
of regressive taxes are things such as sales taxes and property taxes along with user
fees? Humanitarian. These types of taxes and fees impact lower income individuals
more severely than those with higher incomes because the tax takes up a larger share
of their income or most taxes are redistributed. Some taxes are regressive. But these taxes would have
been redistributive taxes. And so you had a southern economy
in southern politics at the time that needed to provide public goods in an environment
in which certainly in the antebellum era, very few public goods were provided. So how do you start
and finance a public school system? You’re going to have to do that by raising taxes. How do you improve
infrastructure that’s been decimated by a civil war? You need to raise taxes. How
do you provide humanitarian aid for those who are widowed, sick and infirm
from a very long civil war? You want need to raise taxes
to do that. And so you’re going to have to have public receipt for these goods because the government
is going to have to step in and provide them and provide those services. So
how can we explain or do you have an explanation for why the
Dunning approach kind of pinioned is a failure kind of painted. The elected officials
as corrupt. But you begin to see a quick rebuttal to this is this is
certainly coming from black scholars. So Dubois and Franklin, how?
Was there something driving this interpretation of reconstruction and led people to see it as
a failure? I think there are a lot of things that were driving that. You know, I gave
an address at it must have in Dartmouth a couple of years ago, actually, about the history
of slavery and reconstruction. You can everything about reconstruction without thinking about what comes
before and also think about reconstruction and what comes after. So
if you’re writing a history of reconstruction, when are you writing it? So if you’re coming out with the ending and you’re looking
at the beginning of the 20th century and you’re looking at the south as economically more bound, certainly
relative to the north, not participating into the great professional, Logans refer to
a moribund economy. And this is referred to as a dying economy or economy that is in a very
unhealthy state. And this is classic would be understood as the South pre and post
reconstruction as the South was mainly an agrarian economy and was unable to
industrialize. And so because of that, its economy was somewhat stagnant or
in a very unhealthy state. You’re looking at the south as economically more bound, certainly
relative to the north, not participating into the great ascension of America
in the 20th century. And you wonder what’s going on. And you have to end. You might be thinking, well, this is
just how the south is always men. It’s important. Understand that gunning comes after
Phillips. Ryan Phillips is writing about American slavery, and he says Americans, they reason
inefficient institution. It leaves the South economically more bound in
the south, as I’ve always thought of it, which is backward to the rest of the nation. All of that
has to be revised. And I think it’s really important for people to understand this stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
One of the things now that history of capitalism is reckoning with which the economic history of slaves
is always reckoned with, is slavery is not this more bound institution. The
South was literally one of the wealthiest places on the face of the earth circa 1860.
Even taking into account the fact that it had a large number of people who were not participating
and certainly direct beneficiaries of that economic ascension, they were still the wealthiest place
on that one. What this place on face of the earth that overturns a whole lot of what we think about
the south. And then we have to think about what how does reconstruction figure into that? Reconstruction was an attempt
to politically and economically realign the south. But southern institutions had
developed predicated on an extreme amount of inequality.
And we see that press, you know, persistent to this day. We sent work that comes out looking
at intergenerational mobility has shown that the south is just a place where there is really
low levels of intergenerational mobility and high levels of inequality. That is a southern perennial.
It doesn’t have anything to do with the level, but it says something about the distribution.
And I think it says something about the politics and the political economy of those places
as well. But then we take that back and we try to fit that into
this mode of, well, that just means these places have been backwards. And that isn’t necessarily always the case,
that that doesn’t mean that they have not been industrial. But I also think that it does not mean
that the South was unfit for capitalism. Yes. You know, that the slave
system was a capitalist system and it was highly successful. Doesn’t work so well
when you do away with slavery as an institution leaves it pretty poor. And then you have a political economy
that was created for one particular type of economic institution, which now has to be in line itself
and reimagine itself in a new reality. That’s been the difficulty for understanding the South.
It isn’t a feature of the slave economy that made the South economically moribund. It’s that the South could
not adapt to a free labor system. If you read the histories of reconstruction
and if you read them from looking at, say, been in the storms along in these other sorts of narrative histories,
Southerners, white southerners could not imagine a free labor market. It just was beyond them.
Now, these are intense capitalists and they believe in property ownership. They believe in property ownership and slaves and property ownership
and land and property ownership and a lot of things they could not fathom how to deal with a free labor market.
Their original ideas included things such as importing Chinese immigrants to work
as slaves. We can we can’t have black slaves. OK, fine. But we’re going to get some Chinese slave. I mean, literally, these are some
of the things that they’re thinking about which shows you that they really just did not want to work with free market capitalism.
I think some of those ideas continue to persist to this day in southern politic.
I don’t think that they’d been called that appropriately in the way that they should be, but those are some of the ideas
you see that with the strong resistance, say, to unions in certain parts of the country, you
see that was strong resistance to the provision of public goods. You’ll see that with strong resistance to
strong protection of voting rights. These are perennial effects from a part
of the world in the United States that has just had long standing
resistance to true democratic institutions. So 150 years
later, it’s still deeply, but it’s basically in the soil. And
it’s something that is Kuznetsov to be rooted out. It’s there. And I think it shows up in a lot of different
ways and your political side. So, you know, the ways it shows and politics better than I do, certainly. But I think
it shows up. I think it shows up in the way that politics marries with religion in the south.
Disbelief. And this worship of a very particular type of free market
capitalism that is not really designed for India has a
different function than we would see in other parts of the world. And yet these places are also relative to
other parts in the United States, poor. So there’s a strong belief,
for example, that very level, low levels of taxes will lead to prosperity. They’ve had relatively low levels
of taxes for quite some time relative to many other states in the United States.
They also receive more federal resources than what they send to the federal government. So they receive less
net subsidies, say, from the federal government, still has not had the prosperity
that they have preached. The places that are actually wealthier in the United States have meant much higher taxes.
How does that work? And I think, you know, so what is going to break that logic, which still I think
has some some element of intuitive appeal,
has not been borne out to have empirical support. One of the things that your work notes
is this connection between taxes and violence in particular, you note that a rise
in taxes is linked to a rise in violence towards black elected officials. Could you explain
this some more? Yes. In some new work, what I have found is that the places that have black
politicians had higher taxes and then higher taxes still,
if you see places that have black politicians who are also met with violence. So aggressive taxation
will stamp out. But the most aggressive taxation appears to have been met with
violence. For those black officeholders now, this is still very preliminary and certainly
work in progress. But I think it’s consistent with the violence that was had to be held
at the end of the reconstruction era. So this was not a revolution. That was
a quiet one. It was one that was a violent one. I still think that story has yet to be told.
But we see those persistent effects. I’ve really been quite impressed as a recent working paper
by two COLEBY-WILLIAMS, who was at LSU and moving to Clemson University
in the fall to certain assistant professor position. And she has looked at persistent effects of racial violence
on voting patterns. And so I think that the seeds of a lot of the things that we talk about today in our politics,
which would include, you know, these but, you know, other persistent effects of the of this political violence,
I think is an open question that that will soon be answered. But I think we see lots of evidence
now that racial violence, racialized violence and racial oppression have persistent effects to this
day. And these are events that happened many, many, many years ago. And we still see persistent effects
on our political outcomes and economic outcomes to this day. You mentioned
how you kind of challenging the historical
account of reconstruction. You’re part of a larger group. People were basically
trying to reframe the way once you understand reconstruction as an economist. Is there anything
in particular about your work? Does that challenges existing arguments within economics?
Yeah, a couple of things. I’ll give one example. So there’s a lot of literature now,
especially from a very famous paper that looked at black names on resume.
And then there wasn’t some follow up work that found maybe there really aren’t these effects to black names
and maybe their sort of effects that don’t really have long durations. Maybe you do see them in
resumé ordered studies, but you don’t see them if you look at a birth certificate things. But all of that
was predicated on this belief that black names are essentially a
basically a late 20th century phenomenon. When I say late 20th century, say to 1970s a post-civil rights
movement, black names, and when I say black names, peoples, what do you mean by black names?
Black names that are highly likely to be held by African-Americans and not likely to be held by whites? My
joke to my friends is, well, you know, we’ve just had the NFL draft. So look at a lot of the names that utilize
these players. Have a called out NFL draft or highly likely to be you know, I don’t know that many white Duchamps.
Almost all the disheartens I know are black. Right. So that’s the black name. So one of the
and this is a typical economist folly is to say we see these black names. Certainly
we don’t see in the historical record a lot of LA Tanyas. So that probably is something that would be contemporary,
but that isn’t an answer to the question of whether black names existed in the past. And so with some
coauthors, Lisa Cooke at Michigan State and John Harmon at William and Mary, we
found that black names actually do have historical precedents. And we found a
black naming pattern among black men in the early 20th century. But
it’s a different set of names in these names or biblical names like Moses and Abraham,
other names like Percy Perley, King, M. Titus.
These are also names that are just as disproportionate historically
as names like Tyronne and Jamal and the Keesha today.
And so black names have a history. And now it becomes much more interesting question, which is
why did these names change as opposed to how did these names come about? Right. So it’s
a very different process and we have a much different narrative. If it’s now black names
have come about from the civil rights movement, which is what people had assumed in now black names are actually
a cultural feature of the African-American community that’s been longstanding and the names have changed.
That’s a very different story that we now have to tell. And that’s been part of what I’ve done. This sort of challenge,
the conventional wisdom. And I think part of what I have found is many of the things that we
take as these foregone conclusions. If you say to a group of social scientists, black names come about from the 20th
century, we’ll just nod their heads because that’s what they believe. But we have to. And I think this is a different part
of economic history. If we think about economics as sort of testing out these economic theories, if the
if we just take those things as given, we would never even write this paper. Right. Because that’s. Taking the assumption
it’s established fact and we go with it, but I think when you marry the narrative evidence, there is now
this way of detecting black names historically. And now why did they come from. Right. And we’re looking at
the very first generation of African-Americans who have been allowed to name their own children.
Doubt the purview of the slave system. And we find from the very beginning a very strong
and distinctive naming pattern among African-Americans. So it’s a cultural perennial.
It’s not something that comes about from the civil rights movement. It
must say then I think, something deeper about African-American autonomy than
people have presumed to exist in the past. So I think there’s a deeper level when you do this
that challenges some of those notions. And I think it makes them more challenging
for the economics community overall. It’s interesting what you found in regard to
how blacks abuse names over time. My understanding is that many
of the names were chosen because African-Americans were never going to be called by
Mr. Smith. Mr. Johnson, they were always going to be called by their first name. And so many
names were chosen, such as King Prince Major, because they wanted to sound
like a regal day. And if you’re going to be called by your first name, they wanted to be something that sounded
very regal. And in addition to this, the name changed to see a post-civil rights movement.
To what degree are the names we’re seeing? post-Reconstruction post-civil rights movement,
really signs of black empowerment or black autonomy? This idea of
embracing the idea that black is beautiful, but also trying to find a way
to navigate a discriminatory world. Yet I think
it deepens the questions that we have to ask about it. Right. So if we now know
that there’s been this long history of these names and we mentioned names. King Master was
your name and your first name is Master. So how do you have to call someone? Now you have to call them by their first name. I
call the master. It’s a very different context, right? Prince
Regal sounding names and then biblical names. So Moses and Abraham
and others, which are very biblical, but very different than we would think of traditional
names that are also biblical in their orientation. And then a third set of names that that
don’t fall in either one of those sets. But also what we found was
we were able to reject another piece of conventional wisdom, which is that African-Americans
named their children disproportionately after presidents. So this would be when I call the the George
Washington Carver hypothesis right up. And we do see this in the narratives say
Ralph Ellison has some pieces and he mentions he said, oh, if only my parents, Adam. Because he’s. Who
is he? He’s Ralph Waldo Ellison, right? Ralph Waldo Emerson. Right. So this idea of naming
your children after famous individuals, we don’t find that there’s any racially disproportionate degree
of doing that. That’s more likely among African-Americans and among whites. Now, it is the case
that some of the names are a little bit different. There are very few we fine whites who are
naming their children after Abraham Lincoln and Alabama in the early 20th century. But we
do see some. We do see similar rates of naming them, say, after Thomas Jefferson
and other sort of famous individuals. So and we don’t see me very many whites or any naming the choice
of Frederick Douglass. But we do see similar patterns of sort of naming that after famous individual
overall. So we don’t see any racial differences in naming your children after
famous individuals, some that we were able to actually also find a new fact. There were historical black names.
But to reject another sort of piece of conventional wisdom as well, which I think is
certainly worth mentioning. So the question is, where do these names come from and why? Why do we have King
and master and Prince in the past? And now we have Tyronne, number one. Tyronne
is actually an Irish name, I think very important to establish. But but second, but
we wouldn’t think of that name today as being Irish. If you see Tyronne Jackson today, you don’t think of someone
with no red hair. And eventually you’re thinking of someone who is black. And so that
in and of itself says us something that’s dramatic and changed. But did we have a deeper story about what what is the intention
when you have these names adopted two people and that then, as I said, gives us deeper questions.
And we don’t if we run with what we believe the names represent, that we implicitly
assume something about where we think the historical origins of these names are coming from.
And if that is changed by the fact these names have a much longer history than we can no longer use those
conjectures. OK. So what does it mean to name your daughter? You know, Lakisha
or Tanya today as opposed to historical name that would apply
to African-Americans in the past. So something has to be going on different about
the naming intention that itself is changing. And that’s important now to investigate.
Right. So it cannot be simply about defiance of conventional norms and making
names that are racially distinctive because those things existed in the past. Why have the names changed? I
think now is the new question. I don’t have a good answer to that right now. But to know that the names have changed.
We had you know, that there was a different set of names in the past that are being used today. So
how can I guess the work you’re doing with the names, but also the work you’re
doing with black elected officials? How could this inform us about issues
going on today? I think it informs us, because it tells
us that we have been living not in only
contemporary circumstances that need contemporary
explanations, but that these are perennials which require a much more nuanced and I think
historically grounded explanation that talk about their persistence over time. They’ve always been
black names and they’ve changed. Then that tells us something different about name, intention
and potentially about name effects. One thing that we found was that black names today
are associated with discrimination in terms of rŽmi audit studies and lower levels of
socioeconomic. So it’s highly correlated with poor outcomes.
Historically, we find that they are protective and have and are associated actually with. Lower
levels of mortalities. In other words, those men who had African-American names live longer than other
African-American men. So some of these effects actually defy some of the conventional explanations
that we we’ve had typically. But then if you think about politicians, I think it goes to the same
extent. So a lot of people believe in political science. You certainly would know this literature better than I do,
that a lot of what we see in contemporary politics might be a backlash to to black office holding. Certainly
that’s what we saw in the reconstruction era. But it tells us that we’re dealing much more
with much long standing issues than things that are much more temporary. It’s easy
to say. We’re sort of like, you know, many times I say in joke that we’re sort of drunks. We’re looking for
our keys under the lamp post. That’s the last place they’re likely to be, but it’s the first place that you should start to look
like. And I think that we do a lot of that with our analysis of racial topics. So we
think about race and policing. This is a perennial issue in African-American communities.
If you read, say, Ida B, Wells are the first crusaders and who died.
Still not having a national lynching anti-lynching law. We still don’t have one yet
to this day. And yet we see these this police thing is many, too many people
very consistent with sort of lynching and these sort of ideas about lynching, a law enforcement.
These are not new issues. These are really perennial American
perennials. And I think it’s very important for people now to think about them as being
consistent, perennial. And I’ll give you another example that people won’t want to talk about. We’ll probably should.
So Kanye West is, you know, running his mouth lately and talking
about slavery being a choice or things like that. You will be very surprised to see some of these
same ideas coming up in the late antebellum era in defense of slavery.
And you see many of these ideas in the early reconstruction era about how good it was
for African-Americans to be in the South and how even in Fogleman inGermany
talk about the economics of slavery, much of which has been absolutely refuted
from deeper discussions in the narrative sources that there were these benefits,
that there was all of this black achievement under this adversity in the slave system, and that there were
these were wards for Hard-Working slaves. All of it has no empirical support. And I spend
a lot of time when I teach American economic history talking about this extensively. But
our ignorance of these historical facts allows
people to say these sorts of things that put us right back into a lot of these discussions
that I think we should certainly have moved past as a nation. Will we continue to go
back to them because we are largely ignorant about the operation of the slave economy. We’re
ignorant about construction. We’re ignorant about Jim Crow. And so we have people and
Country West is the child of a professor. Yes, an African-American professor. He should know better.
Yeah. And yet he’s running his mouth in absolute ignorance. And so if he is saying
all of that, how can we expect other people who should know better? What should they be saying and doing? Certainly
they should be saying something quite different than why Connie West is saying to this day. And I think that’s
really important, that we will continue to have these discussions. They will continue to be important
if we continue to be ignorant about our history, and particularly if we continue to be
ignorant about our race in our and the effects of race on
our political economy historically and all the way down to the present. This is the big question,
I guess. How does your work help us better understand the race problem within the US?
That’s a really big deal. I got it. I think I make very, very small,
very, very small contributions to understanding that race problem. But I think one of the things I’ve been pushing
for and I’ve been challenging my economic history colleagues and
I want to preface this by saying there are very few African-American economic historian, although there
is a very large literature about race in economic history. Put a pin in that, because I think that’s important
for the interpretation and the way that we do this work. I think the contribution that I have
made is to say that we have a economic
history and our race in economic history. And it’s important to understand that
if we’re talking about racial inequality today, this is not anything new. And what we
have to understand then is that we cannot discuss
inequality and racial inequality today without thinking about it as being a function of a long process.
We don’t magically arrive at these points in time, say, 2018,
without thinking about there being something in the past. And it forces us to reconcile
and think about everything. Isn’t just a function of persistence from. Slave experience.
There’s much richer and nuanced patterns. There were so many opportunities to have
progress have always been really struck by the work of I mentioned when I was doing my black names
work. I worked with Lisa Cook and John Palmer, and Lisa has done some extraordinary work with black invention
innovation. And she finds that rates of black patenting are really low. When you have lots of racial
violence. And so we haven’t thought about those methods and we haven’t thought about the effects
of racial violence and racial hatred. And these are the sorts of things on economic
outcomes. Right. And so one of the questions that we still have to wrestle with and I hope that my work is
sort of speaking to is we pay an economic price for these racial
policies. And no one talks about it in that way. And we are very rarely talk about it. We talk about discrimination,
but we haven’t really thought about is we know that we have lower levels of output
in places that have racially discriminatory policies. So that means that we’re willing to pay
for that. So what is our willingness to pay for discrimination as a nation? And it turns
out that it’s a lot and it’s similar to discussions that people have when they talk about
the white working class voting against their interest in something you hear consistently. I do not use
that language myself because it’s not clear to me that they’re voting against their interest. If
we can think about their interest being very much broader and that some of their interest
and some of white interest might be in the support of white supremacy, you might have to pay for that.
You might have to pay for lower levels of economic output overall to maintain
racially repressive regime. You have to pay me economists. Nothing is free. So
if you if you want to have a system of white supremacy will cost you something. The question is, how much is that going to cost you
and are you willing to pay it? That is a way of reframing those questions. And that’s I think the
work that I try to contribute is to think about it in a new way. And instead
of thinking about people are voting against their best interests. No, let’s go. Let’s take that rational man and say people are voting for their best
interests. When how much are they willing to pay for that? If it turns out that it’s a lot of money that they’re willing to pay
for these racially restrictive policies, then it says something about what it’s worth to them. And that
then might be a little bit more disturbing, but it’s certainly we orients the questions
that we’re asking about our political economy kind of going back to the idea of paying
for racial discrimination. It appears me that is in high demand and that
there is, I guess, adequate supply or maybe reduce supply, but there seems
to be a very high demand. And so there are groups that are willing to pay a very high cost
in order to achieve a sense of white supremacy, racial discrimination in
it. And so I guess in thinking about this in terms of kind of supply, demand or equilibrium,
do you believe that the supply is abundant and along with the demand? Or do
you believe the demand is pushing for more supply? Well, I think and I’d be remiss
at University of Texas at Austin. So there’s a very famous quote attributed to
Lyndon Johnson about a willingness to pay for racial discrimination. He says,
you know, if you can simply offer whites the ability to discriminate, they’ll they’ll
pay you. They’ll pay you in the wages they pay you and a whole lot of other ways. And so if you could hold up white primacy,
you can actually have people pay you to their political choices to maintain
that sort of a system. And it’s supply for it, areas of demand.
And that’s always a question that we have will always have. That keeps the economist employed. Right. Because
what we have always are equilibrium outcomes. You believe. What is it? Price movements are getting prices
in quantities and we have supply and demand. Well, the supply equation and the demand equation are both
about prices and quantities. And so that’s both in the supply and demand equation. So
what’s moving is it’s supply and demand. I don’t know. And I think fundamentally that’s what we don’t know.
And I think and hopefully what history in my work tries to contribute are different sort of historical context
was tell us that we might be on the supply dimension much more than the demand dimension or vise versa. But I think
it’s important to understand that both are at work, but that the system might still be the same. Fundamentally,
what does the study of race are issues related to race? How does that help
build the economics fields? What does it provide to the discipline? I think it provides to this
one of a couple of different things. One of which is a challenge. And I continue to tell
my economic colleagues that we need an economic theory
of race. We do a lot of racial analysis. And when we try to unpack what
that is, well, what should race be if we have axioms as economists
that don’t have race at all in their contract? We don’t have a theory of race. So strange
to me that we do all of this racial work and scholarship and we don’t have
fundamentally an understanding what race should be. At a theoretical level. Certainly my
social science brethren in sociology and political science and psychology
are literally light years ahead of us as economist and thinking about race, theorizing
about race and attempting to understand the nuances of race.
And economists are still thinking of race as frankly, usually
a a category of data analysis. Right. And so we have a race variable
in an equation. That’s not gonna cut it. I don’t think that that is the way of thinking about it. I
have advocated that race is really an experience. And that, I think, is why I’m an historian.
So obviously it takes me it’s the cumulative experience, but I don’t think even among a lot of the economic
historians, they’re very comfortable with thinking about race as an experience and certainly not comfortable analyzing
it as an experience. They’d like to think about it as a category, but what is that category mean?
I have not yet received good answers to those sorts of questions that I’m posing. So I
really still in pushing back against that. I’m not a theorist, but I think before we run around doing
a lot of this work, we need to have some really good theoretical dimensions that we
can analyze on race. So there are some people working and making progress on that. William
Sandy Darity, who is at Duke, Derrick Hamilton, who’s at the new school pushing
on some really good work and thinking in stratification. And they are building
new theories that are out there. It is beginning to bear some fruit. And I’m very, very
glad that they have continued to press upon this. And they’re not historians, but they are still thinking about
what it means, theoretically to think about race in groups and people operating in groups, because fundamentally,
economic models don’t have group assignment. Don’t have group identities and affiliations. And so economists
are really always flatfooted when we want to think about these sort of social dimensions. And I think we have to start
that. We have to continue to push upon upon that. And so I’m trying to add a historical dimension in thinking about
when we think about race. What does that really mean and how that’s changed over time? As I experienced it. And so that means also
that we’re going to have to have a different way of thinking about
empirical relations. Not everything that is empirical is necessarily
means that it’s, you know, quantitative. You no empirical evidence can be qualitative as well. That is actual empirical
evidence. And economists don’t necessarily have not always really seen
that or these practice that. And I think that it’s high time we start doing that as well. So that’s part
of what I want to see come happen, happen in our new scholarship.
A nation identifies who it is, but what it has done. A nation’s history is
critical to establishing its place in the world and the norms of its citizens. Several
politicians and pundits hearken to times when the nation was at its greatest.
Professor Logan and scholars like him point out that these times may have been great for some,
but extremely painful for others. Furber His work notes that events
that have been understood as failures had several successful elements by demonstrating
the misinterpretations of the black experience in American history. He hopes to prevent false
narratives, creating damaging situations for black Americans and the nation as
the nation works to reconcile its identity. We must be attentive to how history can be misremembered
and misinterpreted to prevent the creation of narratives that distort the true nature of our problems
and in turn, generate harmful solutions.
Thank you for listening to the American ingredient, American Daniel, a professor in the Department of Government at the University
of Texas. I would like to think Michael heidenreich and Jacob Weiss, their assistants, along
with the Department of Garbarek, the University of Texas and the University of Texas is Elei t-s
Development Studio.