>> c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. >> here's a look at some of the current best selling nonfiction books according to the new york timings. topping the list, thunder and deceit by mark levin where the syndicated radio talk show host calls on young people to resist what he argues is an ever-growing centralized government. , the a-nehisi coats looks at the history and current state of black america in "between the world and me." david mccullough on the birth of flight in the wright brothers followed by the investigation of end-of-life care in "being mortal." a look at "the new york times" nonfiction bestsellers list continues with "dead wake," eric

larson's account of the sinking of the lucetania by a german u-boat 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. that's 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. it's next on booktv. [applause] >> thank you, max rodriguez are. my name is rich from columbia university. it's an absolute pleasure to be hereom to introduce the panel tt will launch the harlem book fair's author panels broadcastl on c-span 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 we'll 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. it's 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 it's a professor of political science and african-american studies at the university. provoked -- her book is

arresting citizenship and democratic consequences of american crime control. i'm assuming that she's 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 shouldn't 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 i'd imagine that they're going to blame. the first is to unpack the title. we have in this title we have wealth, finance, and then

post-civil rights america. first we will unpack the. once we do that i imagine if we haven't 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, it's kind of like a stream, if of money, the wealth is your bond and it's 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 it's a negative number, we are in the red. for some people it's a positive number. in research that now stands over two decades i'm 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 post-civil rights era. >> we will get into this more but one of the reasons why i think it's 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 that's 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 don't 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 can't 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 middle-class 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 didn't 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 we'll 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 i'm not an economist i think of it as a living condition. it's something that's going to allow you to in door aspects of life -- and/or aspects of life that regularly happen. and if you don't have it, he will not be able to sort of bounce back. >> thank you. this is great because i think it's 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 haven't 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 they've 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 that's 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 don't have much money, you're not putting extra money into these accounts. you don't have the wealth to do it. all of the programs for retirement, 401(k) program. most of us, not me, i'm fairly wealthy, but most people don't 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 don't 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 we've had, now i think we've covered both wealth and finance. the last sort of race and that is post-civil rights america in our title. so the question to all of you is two parts. one is how would you characterize post-civil rights america today? and i imagine that the other part of it which you maybe already thinking, how do we think of post-civil rights america is something which has improved? >> if i could jump in before you and hard before doing this, is i don't 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. i'm not comfortable speaking of post-civil 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 hasn't, 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 don't 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 don't 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 i'm 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. that's 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 race-based 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 there's this decline like middle-class? so you talked about sort of inequality between those are the most well-off and those of the lease. we are offering the to decline middle-class t but how do we tae all of that together and understand something of a more coherent kind of story about what's happening? this is for anybody.

these are, there's a statistical fact but there's also an heir to the i think evidence around the shrinking black middle class student the middle-class has been hollowed out. the simple answer to that is, i'll give you one example. because we're 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 he's actions in progress at the top. how we interpret that come we can celebrate the top at least growing marginally, or we can say it's 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 african-american phenomenon. it's 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 haven't 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 can't know for sure how much better or worse it was before the 1960s. but it's been pretty stable around 10 cents on the dollar. typical african-american them has one-tenth the assets of the meeting or typical white family. that's 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 report-remarkable 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%. there's many measures but that's just one of them. when the crisis happened it seemed like it was almost a natural law, things have gotten too top heavy, they're 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 1929-1931, 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 didn't 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 that's reflected also in the black wide gap which has continued to rise since 2007. why did we get a bailout unlike in 1929? the irony is because a much greater proportion of americans are invested through their 401(k) and through their college savings account for the kids or what have you come are invested for being in the stock market or so to save their

pennies they had to rescue the pound of the very elite rich. and so we've got more of the same can increasing any questions the crisis rather than a rethinking of a leveling off. so i think given the importance of wealth to other things like education, you already mentioned voting. i think i've criminal justice is in your area where wealth has not been tested yet but for health, education, for job prospect watcher comes wealth is one of the most important predictors really the second most important predictor after your parents education level, whether their college graduates or have graduate degrees, that this, i personally think of wealth as one of the route, not to minimize criminal justice asia or health issues or a things but i think wealth is the most extreme, even one-tenth

ratio, and really critical issue that's not as much in the public policy issues terms of racial equality of opportunities that should be. >> i know this is one of the areas you've done great work on. if you're making the case for health and central to this conversation, how would you make that particular -- >> for health or wealth? >> as relates to the wealth inequality. >> we know that, there's a really strong correlation between social position, whether you measure that by your educational level or your wealth or your occupation and your health. literally how long you live. we also know that there's a huge race gap in life expectancy in other diseases.

we also know that financial crises tend to lead to negative health effects and we know that negative, probably more important negative health events leads them is number one cause of bankruptcy in america now. we have just had finally the last couple of years the affordable care act go into effect. it really could be one of the most important policies that everybody is going to insurance supposedly got a passenger americans will have insurance that will hopefully stop the health care crises from being one of the biggest wealth trainers and crisis you're talking about earlier that destroyed low wealth, uninsured families best eggs. so hopefully that will attenuate but we don't know yet.

>> this actually leads us i think into the discussion between wealth and other things. health and one of them. education and citizenship, criminal justice. i will sort of say i have noted that there's i think a motion to strike post-civil rights america on this may be just strike post and that sort of second the motion. >> i just add to the very good summary what you are in the langston hughes auditorium and i was thinking of, those of you who grew up reading the langston hughes as i do remember he may take years in a defense plant and he did hard physical labor. the health issue is tied to the kind of work people do. i'm retired professor -- professor. i'm in good health but i didn't do hard physical labor.

most people of color to really hard physical labor and their worn-out a lot sooner so that the efforts to raise the social security beyond 65 because they want to do that because they think people are living healthy and later. but not all people are living longer. not all people are living healthier. i thought that was an important point to make because that's another area of inequality. just people being worn-out through how they have to earn their living. i just wanted to add that. >> so vesla can you work on citizenship and criminal justice. how do you do your research? how have you seen the relationship between wealth inequality and -- >> i mean, i think we were talking a financial instrument earlier. one of the biggest things that is not on the public radar. it is not a political savings right now but it is ah

.. that really hurts low-income and middle-income communities come is legal financial obligations. so it's not just that blacks are more likely to get bad subprime loans, to pay more for their mocha kiss combat more student debt, more medical debt, to be more unbanked it's also the case that they showed a big burden of legal financial debt. in other words, when you come into contact with the criminal justice system, you are tagged with what's kind of in a properly called user fees. so anything from room and board so any confirmed room and board in jails to probation fees to victim restitution and the

numbers are striking. they are not quite as well researched as they should be. but he used the work of some of our sociological colleagues, the average black person that access be injustice involved a $17,000 in legal financial obligation which is crippling for folks who have money. i think that is one piece of the hidden wealth to start their mechanisms. another hidden wealth destroyer has to do with the work of devin fergus and just by virtue of what zip code you live in, what neighborhood you call home, you are going to be shouldered with higher auto insurance premiums. you will pay more to lenders for your health. you have a bevy of different

things that mean you are paying more for your goods and services into the daily life. now the thing i want to get into this conversation because as a political scientist that bothers me about the national conversation on wealth inequality is it is often just a statistic that blacks are so much further behind in asset accumulation. what is it about their behaviors that is leading them to be in that situation? i want to talk about the policies and practices of various levels of government and private sector actors that drive those processes. on my mind today is, you know, when affirmative action was lovely. we have this hidden history of a moment when the nation cemented the white middle class come in cemented affluence can help them get educational loans, help them buy their first house is and

also a moment where we cemented blacks not having access to those things. i've never seen somebody run some numbers on this, but how's that triple across generation of not having access to those instruments of financial security? >> i can tell you the numbers. the economist franklin leon he says 20% lifetime inheritance is attributable to past generations that doesn't mean direct inheritance. that means one kid graduates this year a student and any other with $100,000 at that because of their parents. larry summers put it at 80%. i'm not going to go through researchers so i will split the middle and say 80%.

that is what wealth is as opposed to education that directly literally picks up the recruitment of past injustices and past inequities and will take longer even if we have the right policies and not the wrong policies would still take a couple generations at least to close the gap. it is the most daunting statistic. >> i almost feel like we need to get away from the language of the vocabulary of cap and disparity feel very to populate it to me. it feels very apolitical and ahistorical. it feels like we are statistics walking around. we are just numbers. i am a college around the experience experiments and he asked people to think about certain images and when you hear the term and equality as people

point to graphs and figures and statistics. and then he says what do you think of when you think of the term unemployment and they point to people, groups of people. we need to shift the vocabulary away from cap, disparity, inequality to more purposeful language that this was a policy driven phenomenon from all levels of government across the decade continually remade. it has incredible feedback effects and it's not simply i did neglect a bank account. i didn't pay my car loan on time. there's all kinds of mechanisms that have to do with policy choices, explicit policy choices and that is not in our conversation. it is hard to start a movement.

we can point to explicit practices and policy choices. when you're talking about caps-on disparities, you don't have a villain. there is no something to move against. it's all about you just need to get yourself a bank. >> so what is the alternative? what is the hashed out right away to get to think about people and not some line graph only talk about this issue. >> i don't have an answer. good question. >> i can say something, i mostly think about why people, not black people because most black people think they are discriminated -- way people think they are more discriminated against than white people. the polls are overwhelming that they think the special treatments for blacks means

blacks get more than white skin. these discussions we have about blacks being discriminated against, that is nonsense to them because blacks are getting special treatment of money come education, things thrown at them. and white america it looks different and white america votes conservative. it's it's getting more and more reactionary because their lives are getting harder. the fact that black people's lives are getting harder still if they don't see it that way and i think that's tremendously important. i want to comment also -- i'm happy to talk about the past. i'm happy to talk about slavery and the fact that capitalism in america was built on the work of but people, that black people are the wealth of america, it is a civil war started, 62% of our export was caught in, but the new york banks made their money

off of slaves, off of the cotton trade and the new england mills were built on caught. the wealth of america comes from black people. you can trace it all the way through. if you look now and the history continues when ferguson came into the news michael brown was shot by the way police man, and the thing that struck me was not that another like a man was killed a white cop, but the way ferguson works, ferguson is a suburb of st. louis. st. louis, the whites left because they moved to while away suburbs. they moved to sell entre small suburbs that are not economically viable. it used to be all white. the whites to control ferguson paid the town budget by arresting them because they tail

light is out, but in the court system, charging all these fees. those towns around st. louis and not not the only city this is true like a chunk of their city budget off of black people through fines, jail fees and all the rest of that. this is the reality of it. i think a conversation of this kind that works well for liberals about how the system is unfair has got to be extended to think about how white oppression still works and why stone understand this and they think they are the ones abuse. i just had to say that. i'm sorry. >> just to add to that, it is amazing to me how often does prior says of the extraction of wealth unlimited wealth, we don't have the conversation of what is going on there and the

subprime lending and the economic conditions. we need to bring those conversations together. people read ferguson has been an anomaly, operational, outlier corrupt government. but those kinds of practices are lined up with practices of extracting well of extracting well through the gulf financial obligations, a greater mortgage payment, to zip code profiling and they are all ip is them we don't tend to think of some that way still what emerges is a picture of black communities they guess they are hit over here by the corrupt municipal budgeting and yes they are hit over here by the subprime lending and yes they are hit over here by the auto industry charging them higher, but we don't have a language for discussing all of that kind of systematic, policy driven extraction of wealth that

regularly occurs in the lives that makes it difficult for people to be financially responsible. not to mention how incredibly defeating it is. >> so we covered some criminal justice and health and voting behavior. we haven't really touched on education or employment and i want to give you a chance either from your research are drawing from your respect their field, so does give a sense of also how we can do that and keep thinking about what the right languages to capture this. we actually have an even covered all of the particulars of implications as well. so first on the matter of education, i was curious to get your thoughts on how 11 thinks

about the educational crisis that we have, and understanding of differences in wealth, how that helps us understand the issue of education in particular, one of the things i wanted to bring up and this could be said too about crime which i'm sure you've been in the debate for what is causing what. there are certainly people who argue that education is a cheap cause of their wealthy friends as i'm sure the argument has been made and people of also made an argument that relates to crime as well. i guess the question is into cars. think about the relationship between wealth and education but also what do we know about how one of them affects the other. >> you're absolutely right there

is a bidirectional relationship. obviously achieving a high level of education helps them in the labor market earn a higher wage or higher well, but if we look at -- if you compare blacks and whites in terms of any other group, in terms of likelihood of graduating from high school, there is no real gap in black weight high school graduation rates. there is an quality of education in terms of graduation rate. then you go to college and you find that is where educational inequality leads in terms of the degree starts to emerge. if you just do that that comparison like they do in the newspaper with a talk about dropout rates or be a completion rates by race, you really compare apples and oranges because unlike many other

developed countries, college is really expensive here, for your college in particular. what i founded my own research is when you do that apples to apples can harass them, look at a kid coming from a family but the same parental education and wealth level, you have to do both. both of those matters but nothing else really matters. then you find the college graduation rates from a four-year degree program by age 25 are the same. it is not rocket science because we know college costs money, even if we are talking about the state school where the tuition as low an increasingly rare these days for four year institutions because it means you still have to have living expenses and in fact holding down jobs and taking out loans and so forth is one of the major causes of folks not finishing

college at all or on time. so wealth -- parental wealth is key to launching a successful or ensuring a successful post secondary educational career and also for job searches and job searches in that period extended adolescence after college and starting a career we find that parental wealth matters. said the unequal outcomes of the previous generation become the unequal starting positions for the next generation and that is sort of the cycle that i have observed an education is key in that cycle but itself is affected by the prior generation. >> things are changing that not only by the public universities and i taught my entire career in

different public universities. the governments are getting far less money for education, for their colleges and universities. this means tuition goes up in the kids have to come up with more money and they are taking out huge loans at a time when the jobs they get when they get out of college are not paying enough to pay back loans. these kids will be in debt the rest of their lives and their parents will be in bad because when the kid defaults on a loan that is cosigned by their parents, their parents are then liable for the loan. the banks got congress because the banks seem to have some influence with congress to prevent default on student loans even when the students in no way can pay back the loan. you've got this new shuttle system that you are indentured for life out of college loans that are not payable because you

don't have jobs that earn enough to pay it back. the other thing about wealthy parents as they understand finance. most working class parents in this job people have no idea the debt they take on, the consequences of the bad are taking on huge loans and create a life of poverty or they will not be able to buy homes and a lot of kids don't want to get married and have kids because they want to bring the kid up right and they can't afford it. you've got a system because the public sector is defunded because tax cards are going to the wealthy and the government has a structural deficit. the difference between its basic expenditures and what it takes is this huge gap. what they demand as more cuts in spending and the spending they want cut the spending that benefits poor people and people of color.

this is different. this has not always been this way. through the 60s we had progressive programs. we have a different political situation so it's not just the developments on education in cost and no one, but the politics intensified the suffering going with that there needs to be pointed out. >> if i can jump in here, we have to unpack the college caused or college loan crisis and there's definitely different components. the work number one, a two year degree means very little in the economy. you need a four year degree if you are going to make it worthwhile to borrow the money. the absolute worst outcome is to borrow money for three and half years and not get that degree. employers care you have to

degree. a lot of people end up in dire straits because they borrow money and never actually got a degree and then talk about the wealth is extraction industry, we have the fact that for-profit colleges can get the guaranteed loans and even the pell grants. there is basically a giant vacuuming mechanism and i know the obama administration is trying to do some end up before for-profit colleagues are strong allies and that seems to me the most tragic and the degrees from those schools are not worth degrees from any state university in the country. and they cost a lot more. they are exactly like the subprime aggressive blunders and

advertising everywhere from the new york city subway to late-night tv and so forth and making promises about the value of the degrees which are not true. it's really an extraction for private shareholders and that needs to be on the political radar as well and starting to be a little bit, but hopefully very quickly. >> if you look at the racial demographics of who was going to the for-profit colleges, it is largely black women who wind up with a degree as he said that doesn't mean as much their returns as much the return stood for income and wealth is not as great and they're saddled with debt. >> a lot of these for-profit companies are owned by investment tanks. they send their people to welfare offices and bought

churches to drama business line two people about the private education is going to be as people have pointed out. the other thing about it is the government pays for it. you touched on that but it's tremendously important. these for-profit colleges can get up to 90% of their income from the government and they do. all the money is coming from taxpayers. then the debt goes to the students. heavily people of color so that we lose about 10 and it is again this wealth extraction that targets people of color so heavily, so in education, the other thing at the top that you

are not seeing very many people from the bottom of the income distribution. ec legacies of people whose parents went to jail and columbia. my daughter is now teaching at columbia and it's a different situation than public university. my kids go cold turkey of the day before the exam or they are pregnant or sleep in the limousine because they are limousine drivers. what it takes to go through college and the privilege some people have of living in dorms and having enough money versus other kids, these differences are a man and they come from a total system. what i get out of our discussion about my colleagues on the panel had said is totality of the expressive system is huge. i know we don't have much time and we don't have much to do

about it. i'm looking forward to the panel and the politics later in the day that perhaps they might say some things about it. >> so let move to that discussion. a couple they are radical motivating questions and then we can get into details around it. let's say that a genie appears in front of us and as i will great into things. one is to pick a policy to eliminate. that would be eliminated. the other is the institute of policy. those are the two that you get. what would you say? >> i will go first. two eliminations and i will leave the positives. while i would eliminate any

public funding whether that is loan guarantees or pell grants and for-profit colleges and squeeze them dry. i cannot cap home mortgage income deduction, interested action because as was said earlier, we believe in home ownership is a country goes back to jefferson, but there's no reason we should be subsidizing as much mentions upon mentions comic even second homes. there should be a limit. we will subsidize a modest reasonable home that the typical or median american family should be able to afford but beyond that we should not be subsidizing. this would be my two that i don't think are totally unrealistic. i can get you the totally unrealistic vellum soon.

>> what would you say to the people and there are several advocates for the for-profit colleges that they provide an on ramp to an education for people who otherwise wouldn't have it. and yes they resulted in debt and they're not as good as the four year public is a tuition degree, that they are allowing people working without degrees to go back, oftentimes in their 30s. >> in most places there is plenty of public options that people -- i work for free for university called the university of people that's essentially free and just as good as university of phoenix which will charge you a lot of money for education at the same convenience.

the language that would work in american politics, and the fact that this is not private enterprise. this is corporate welfare, but they are getting the public focusing on the fact that they are just true for a nap public resources, that they are not really business is in competition in the real economy. they are just like defense contractors. they are something just like welfare and the government and that the language most americans will resonate with and turn the tide rather than focusing, strategically to focus on them taking their money rather than the fact the damage it does to the students which of course is the ultimate issue but in terms

of political tactics, focusing on the fact they are taking taxpayer dollars to be the more effective argument. >> i'm going to go with one big philosophical transformation. not necessarily a policy intervention had one smaller thing. the smaller thing is to close the mismatch between the extent of student loan funding, pell grants available to people that often enable first-time college goers to access college opportunity, close the gap between pell grants falling behind in tuition costs rising over time. and i'm a big philosophical transformation and something we haven't yet touched on but that keeps coming back to me in every

conversation i have like this and that is as a society we tend to think that we can get equality on the cheap. we think that we can do this by tinkering around with policy designs and not actually challenging the private decisions that all of us make daily in our lives. one of the decisions that is still very politically correct, there is no public norm. there is a big public norm against discrimination but there is not public norm against constantly reaffirming the segregated neighborhoods. said the affluent are incentivized to make private decisions to accumulate more wealth, to keep their kids -- i live in new haven and i see this all around me. the yale faculty and anyone affiliated with yale listed one specific neighborhood and there

is one good school for the entire city of new haven and they all send their kids about one specific good school. or if they can't they send them to private education. i think until there is a real norm against private behaviors like that, we will just keep having the same conversation across generations. i've seen this among progressives, liberals who believe to their core inequality and want to do the right thing. but then they say i decided to live in this neighborhood and i decided to send my kid to this school and i make a little donation to the other score that neighborhood and i feel okay about it. until there is a strong public norm against private behaviors that accumulate wealth and drive intergenerational wealth

accumulation, we are not going to get very far. if the genie was here and i could wish for anything, it would be the similar norm against discrimination would exist against private choices that reduce benefits regularly. these actions hurt others. they draw down resources for failing schools. they mean you don't interact with neighbors who have different income levels. they mean you don't even need to see the poor on a regular basis. until we have that conversation we can tinker around with getting rid of the home mortgage reduction and tinker around, my other suggestion of increasing pell grants but we are going to get very far. >> let me ask a question without. let's are to change the way we think about it.

what would we say as an alternative? we lived in chicago for 12 years am we were one of the black professional families that moved back to the hood. maybe the first couple of months we were there there were two boys coming by on a bicycle and we got in a conversation about going to school and when i asked about the school he said do not send your children there. this is a young black boy. it just broke my heart. he went on to talk about just how challenging that was. this 10 euros recommendation based on his experience, that i should not send the children there. so what does one do?

what does one do with that norm? he speaks to the totality of what needs to change in order for that conversation. >> i'm not sure exactly and this is what i study but why not organize a community job were several families that believe in the value of not just getting your kid up the ladder, but giving them a diverse environment and teaching that the value of flipping around people of different means. i live in a similar neighborhood. 90% lacking latino, mostly working class, falling under the asset poverty line as it were. if i didn't live in that neighborhood i wouldn't have a chance to give my old laptop to the 12-year-old kid that lives next door to me. i wouldn't have the chance to interact and say check out the preschool my kid goes to. people said to us the same thing.

it's more criminal in that neighborhood. your housing value bonuses as. and we are fine and i like it and its value to not type or segregate himself and i guess that is made big if i were to transform some thing it is that. i don't know how you do it. maybe when you get to regular school age i will have different feelings. but it's really funny how quickly people become pseudoscientific when it comes to their own children and their own decisions about where to live. there is no science saying that if you send your child to a school that does not the greatest test scores but the bad test scores will rub off on your kid. there is no science saying it. why not embrace the actual

science which is parenting matters, reading to your kid matters, talking to them matters regardless of what schools they are going to. but i think this conversation is not one i see in "the new york times" and not one that i am hearing. in fact, it might be opposite. the regular messages when we first moved to jail, you need to live in this neighborhood could you send your kid to the school. it is my most approximate example. you are absolutely right. >> and so we think of these things in structural terms and not individual terms, we won't have to change we need. it is important that people struggle as you explain the current situation and how you

lived your life. change comes when people organize demand that the system change and that is the issue. i would endorse the suggestions he made on education. there are thousands of changes that would make a difference. the freedom budget black wives matter has an economic program some people are working on which is very good. we know what needs to change. the question is how to change. i was thinking your genie coming here and granting us the wish, does anybody here remember the play? you remember the genie and he turns the racist cracker black? if white people could understand

black reality and get out of -- ossie davis was great, brilliant. the problem is by people and scared white people. mostly scared white people. until they understand where their oppression comes from and it's not from blacks, we can't have to change that will make a difference for people of color. i go for ossie davis is genie and help white americans understand a great deal more about the realities people here have been describing that people in the audience know very well because academics as for policy advice i'm going to detroit to see an expert witness for a trial against the finance manager and teacher. every black city, predominantly

black city in michigan as an emergency financial messenger taken over by the democratically elect a governor while white cities in as bad shape that should have financial methods. sorry to a sick stuff that's got to be fought has to be seen structurally and change their collective action. >> women held up on not to follow question. what would you say to someone like me as a concerned citizen talking very high-level policy and of course sometimes when we talk high level it is not clear for a concerned citizen what one can do.

i don't know any policymakers. i i don't have enough wild to influence a policy maker. what are some things i can do? >> each of us will work in ways that seem sensible to us and are consistent with who we are. we can't tell people there were seven people here a year ago in staten island and got murdered or caught. a year later that is still and is a reality

>> with a large enough numbers and intensity to change that, it doesn't change. what we see as people get organized, deblasio is a decent guy. he's making some differences and support the politicians who do good stuff. but we also say it is the system that is broken. this is a broken system and it needs changing and the only way apple changes to an organization. as individuals we can't do it as a concerned guy, what are you going to do. we can give money to the organization and the marching isn't quite as easy for us. we can teach them and give them a sense of the history that the

only changes that matter characters struggle. and that is what we can do. even if they seem small collectively as we do at the world changes and they will tell you. >> it's a very good question. there is one starting up on the advisory vote for community change. and we'll reorient and make economic demands the most broadly realizing.

your fate is linked that we as political scientists have begun to sad leverage levels of an mm wealth inequality that make us look more like an oligarchy than a democracy. and the extreme levels of wealth inequality in income inequality are hurting the democratic democratic function and are contributing to spatial sorting and the maps from the 1970s. today you are much more likely to live in counties with other people of similar political persuasion. it has meant the parties have pulled further and further apart them are difficult to compromise legislation through. the ach achievement notwithstanding his extremely hard to eke out political broad consensus on the legislation in conditions of extreme

polarization and not polarization has everything to do with wealth polarization and income inequality. if you look at income inequality of her time to track each other quite neatly. by realizing we are kind of all in this boat together and if we are all in an oligarchic vote, how are any of our achievements? you see the syntax dynamic all the time. when you are forced to pay for emergency health care but somebody else are forced to pay for failing schools over there into new haven it's not uncommon for someone to own every killer old house can be paid $85,000 in property tax because i might be able to keep it over there and live in a different neighborhood

but i will be taxed for it. i'll be paying for it. until we have the broader conversation that we've reached levels of racial and class-based inequality that are simply not sustainable for the democratic hopes of our nation, that can be a sort of broader mental transformation that makes people realize it's to bring people above the asset poverty line. >> i'm of the school that there's a thousand policies from universal preschool and early childhood to paid family leave to simply make a nest egg for every american when they are bored that can accrue and by

virtue of being born to this rich country have a nest egg. by virtue of her citizen ship. i can get a thousand of maybe 100 different policies getting rid of the cap on social security and to savor pension system, rather than raising the retirement age as william mensching. but i also recognize you don't get the thousand changes about a social movement behind it. i guess i would like to ask my fellow panelists what you think because we have this moment would occupy wall street a couple years ago that seems to have passed and it's very depressing to me that it did

seem like a potential for some real policy change or political change from that and not that seems to afflict beyond our grasp. i assume what you talk about in social movements but what could we have done differently or what could we do differently now? >> i think the way things are going, we talked about the shrinking middle class and against something like the statistics are 25% of young white people born after 1972 middle-class families dropped out of the middle class. it is 37% for african-americans born into the middle class have dropped out. the shrinking of the middle class is disproportionately impacted by people but it's

impacted white people, too. with the globalization, the loss of jobs that people with skills that education could do, with technological changes that have taken even accountants, paralytic roles, and information processing area where the technology can now do so much. even retail trade with amazon and have instead delivered to your door, people work in the warehouses of low wages under horrible conditions. we don't see them. they are preparing stuff that you buy but you don't see the exploitation of the better jobs coming in a jobs coming unionized jobs with lifetime security has been disappearing.

the attack on teachers and poverty is no excuse because the kid comes hungry and goes to a place where there's no room to study and prepare for school the next day that none of this matters. it is the fault of the parents and that the teachers. we are in the spirit that is a very dramatically different. in the postwar period. the technology, globalization, financial inflation as so many of us are in bad and the debt is dominating our lives and the inability to get out of it is stronger in europe because the euro and in america, we are doing better than these countries. but we are not doing well. we are in a different historical. and it is my sense that young

people know this and we will see. i was thinking as you were talking when i was in college the vietnam war was starting and a group of us antiwar act to this every week would go to a different dormitory and it lain kennedy had sent so-called helpers to train the south but what was really going on and what it would become. it is frustrating because we thought we would never get anywhere. as we develop, more people join the antiwar movement. it was the same when the kids that down and then we are in a period where that is going to happen. it has to happen because what happens to so many people in this country is not good and it's the inequality you both were talking about. it is more extreme and an ear

not 1929, the 1928 as you pointed out, the rich lost a lot, but this time around the federal government gave it back to them and that is why the ruling class did not have the same interest as the new deal did to create a demand and create jobs in the one because with globalization everybody is trying to do it to somebody else. unless the martians buy a lot of stuff, china can't keep exporting because we can't keep buying it. you are working with a very serious global economic situation and begin what teams bid like the war in vietnam, there will be organization, there has to be in the changes begin small and i agree with all the small sub sessions they are not the small.

they make a big difference for real people. there's going to have to because we will have a more jobless economy, there are too many people looking for work and not finding it and wages will continue to be pressed down and the 1% is hitting 95% of the increase in national and come. so growth doesn't help the other 99% because 95% is going to them. we have had wage stagnation for three coming on for decades the people's money income going up, but their real income has been stagnant and a lot of people surviving is a real issue. what is preventing the economic movement that can change that is racism. the racism in america keeps

whites thinking of government test programs for education and building infrastructure for all the things the country needs, it will help them and it help them animal, but by tax dollars. this is the racism of the current. it is different than the old-style racism of lynching and cross burning and all that, but a real racism into a post-civil rights america and i think we have to both educate ourselves and work with other people to understand the current moment, what is wrong with the way it is set up, the kinds of things we can fight for and that is what comes out of this and that is their job. there's no easy way. that's the work we have to do. >> i've also been struck at the rise and fall of the 99%.

my speculation as we are still in an era where we learned about how to do protesters social media. while that allows for the spread and gathering people it doesn't necessarily allow for it to coalesce whether through a consistent message or really care even if the leader is symbolic or anything else. as an observation misses one thing we've noticed. i'm curious to see how we evolve through the use of social media for these types of act committees but certainly with the occupying movement, many groups are out there with multiple agendas animated difficult to maintain. there were other factors of course. that is one that i observed.

we have a few more minutes i would give each of you and mena i like having the broader conversation and one minute on what your book is about and the specifics of it. thank you for coming. this is a fantastic discussion and we could keep talking and i hope we do keep talking not just with one another, but all of you as well. there are a lot of is but one nice thing about the way we wrapped it up, there's also paths for hope and progress and we can think of a more sophisticated way about all these different factors associated with wealth and inequality in how we can start to think about work together,

something concrete is voting rights, but also how we use it in our discourse. bible and their because i want to make sure everyone has their minute. it is a minute for what your current book is about. >> the reason i am on this panel, "being black, living in the red" tries to put it at the beginning of our policy debate and specifically racial inequity in wealth argues for a new affirmative asset policy and other policies to promote integration of neighborhood since family homes are the primary vehicle of paul's and goes over the evidence and of the importance of wild and what

we can do to promote equal opportunity in the united states. >> well, my current research is on interracial inequality across cities with jennifer hope shield, but that book is written. my book that i published last year was called the resting citizenship and its main intervention was to say look, a major part of government for the black poor are in governance happens through being involved with the criminal justice system and we need to understand if we want to understand what democracy means, what citizenship is in these communities we have to understand how these topped by police, being a bit dead, been

sent to the halfway house affects one's political life world, affects how they see and make claims on the state and how they weather and how much faith they have in the american dream, affects how they coalesce with others around shared interests. if you can believe it, most political scientist mostly treated criminal justice is an apolitical institution. it was sort of a bureaucracy. it wasn't politically consequential and so i was trying to argue along with amy lehrman but this is important for how people make meaningful the quality of their citizenship and what came out of the intervention the past four or five decades was something called custodial citizenship. people feel they need to stay under the radar.

people that feel the only government they see as the police from the people that feel they don't have an equal shot at the american dream. most of my work has to do with the bottom half of the distribution, not the top half. i believe what is going on at the top has everything to do with extraction and custodial supervision at the bottom. >> macroeconomists live from the large and inequality is bad for the reasons we've talked about and thought about. but it's also bad economically because it means people don't have enough money that would make their lives better. to people at the top end up with a up with a surplus but they

don't invest so goes into financial speculation in a bit of financial asset, derivatives and stocks and the crashes and not his word happened in 2007, 2008 and will happen again because the inequality shows economic growth because we can make the things people want because people don't have the money to buy. it is not -- that makes it harmful and i want to leave you thinking a little bit about that. >> thank you very much. >> thank you all three of you and thank you for coming. >> thank you so much. another round of applause for amazing panelists. you guys were fantastic.

i want to say something about post-civil rights america. that was the focus of the conversation. we want to invite you guys to stick around. before that we ask that you go around the barn and noble tend, bring it back and they will have a sign right here. you'll join us back in here at the auditorium at 1:00 p.m. for a panel between newkirk and transport that is a director here at the research center. [applause] ..