Systemic Interventions

Summary

Slate Money – "Systemic Interventions" (June 6, 2020)

Host: Felix Salmon
Co-Hosts: Anna Szymanski, Emily Peck
Guest: Stacey Marie Ishmael (Editorial Director, Texas Tribune)

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Episode Overview

This episode of Slate Money tackles a tumultuous week in business, finance, and society, framed by the release of a bewildering May 2020 jobs report and the eruption of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests after the killing of George Floyd. Felix Salmon and his co-hosts are joined by Stacey Marie Ishmael for a deep, nuanced discussion of economic recovery, racial inequality, reparations, and the role of corporations and policy in addressing systemic issues.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. May Jobs Report: Surprising Numbers and Hidden Realities

• [02:22] The team dives into the "shocker" unemployment report: 2.5 million jobs created in May, bringing the official unemployment rate down to 13.3% from higher levels, contrary to expectations.
• Data Caveats: Stacey highlights statistical "messiness"—many people misclassified, with real unemployment undercounted by potentially 3%.
  • Quote: "There is some messiness in this, in the way that there has to be." – Stacey [03:38]
• Disparities Remain: Despite overall improvement, black and Asian unemployment rates did not budge or increased, while Hispanic/Latino rates hit 17.6%—the highest among all groups.
  • Quote: "The unemployment for African Americans went up... while everyone else... the overall unemployment rate went down." – Felix [06:01]
• Mixed Interpretations: The panel debates whether this is "good news" or "bad news," referencing Paul Krugman’s warning that a perceived recovery might dissuade further government intervention.

2. Pandemic, Reopening, and Curfews: Conflicting Policies

• [09:08] Stacey underscores uncertainty about the effects of reopening, possible second waves of COVID-19, and the economic impact of curfews during protests.
• Conflicting Guidance: Emily laments the whipsaw from "stay home" to "reopen" back to curfews, asking, "What do you want from us?" [10:58]
• Policy Effectiveness: The hosts express concern that high unemployment—though improving—remains historically severe and may not guarantee further stimulus, especially in an election year.

3. Elections and Unemployment: What's More Important?

• [12:18] Felix puts the classic question to Stacey: is the level or the direction of unemployment more important in elections?
• Nuanced Impact: Stacey stresses that the distribution of unemployment and disenfranchisement matters—a high rate declining might not help if those most affected can’t vote or lack economic buffers.
  • Quote: "The real unemployment rate really matters... but the effect of the real unemployment rate might not be matched by someone's ability to cast their votes as to how they feel about it." – Stacey [13:52]

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4. Structural Racism and Economic Inequality

The Depth of the Racial Wealth Gap

• [14:37] Stacey paints the broad context of black economic disenfranchisement:
  • The average white household holds as much wealth as 9-11 African American households of the same income.
    • Quote: "That's a middle class household with like $65,000 annual income has like seven or eight times as much wealth as an African American household with the same income." – Felix [15:24]
  • Homeownership, credit access, generational wealth, school discipline rates, and the presence of policing intersect to restrict opportunity.
• Historical Stagnancy: Emily notes that black Americans owned 0.5% of US wealth after emancipation—today, it's just 1.1%.
  • Quote: "Today... black people own about 1.1% of all the wealth in the United States." – Emily [17:14]

The Difficulty of Change

• [17:23] Felix observes: entrenched inequalities often persist for centuries, much like northern/southern Italy's economic gap—meaning progress is extremely slow without radical intervention.

Public Policy: What Would Work?

• [18:51] Stacey: Before solutions, there must be consensus on the reality of the disparity. She calls for:
  • Data-driven recognition of facts
  • Targeted interventions: Affirmative action, homeownership and redlining remedies, enforcement of acts like Community Reinvestment, regulation of digital redlining.
  • No "single thing" will work—systemic problems require systemic interventions.
    • Quote: "You have to treat systemic problems with systemic interventions." – Stacey [21:20]

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5. Reparations: Why and How?

• [24:28] Ana raises the daunting issue: 400 years of harm can't be undone by tweaks—America owes a literal debt for centuries of unpaid labor.

  • Quote: "[The country] was built on unpaid labor that's incurred a lot of interest over the years. It should be paid out." – Ana [24:13]

• Where to Start?

  • HR 40 Commission: Stacey supports the idea of starting by studying and documenting harm—land theft is a "receipt-rich" area ripe for focused reparations.
    • Quote: "Studying is the correct and wise starting point, because... there are different ways of tackling this. You could start from... land theft." – Stacey [25:50]
  • Targeted Wealth Creation: Emily cites Marisa Baradaran—homeownership grants, free land, and student loan forgiveness as reparative tools.
  • Housing as Policy: Felix suggests the US needs more affordable housing, and targeting African Americans would both address past wrongs and current economic needs.

• Structural Policy Barriers: Stacey notes incentives like the mortgage interest deduction have excluded non-homeowners, compounding historical disparities.

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6. Numbers Round: Data That Stings

• Contact Tracers in Texas: Stacey [31:40]—Texas pledged 4,000 tracers by June 1; only 2,900 were in place, showing the challenge of state-level pandemic response.
• 20.9 Million: Felix [32:54]—Approximate number of unemployed in the US per the latest report, warning against adding up weekly jobless claims.
• Police Killings in Brazil: Ana [34:23]—In April, Rio police killed 6 people per day (up 40% year-on-year); 75% of victims are Afro-Brazilian.
• LEGO’s $4 Million Donation: Emily [35:30]—LEGO donates to protest causes, suspends police-themed marketing amid unrest.

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7. Corporate Donations & Diversity Statements

• [38:21] Slate Money dissects the wave of corporate donations/statements.
  • PR vs. Substance: Stacey draws a sharp line between performative statements and real change.
    • Quote: "There is a really substantial difference between PR... and things that are actual change in a corporate context." [40:18]
  • Policy Contradictions: Co-hosts point out that many same companies resisting minimum wage hikes, paid leave, and meaningful diversity in practice are rushing to send symbolic messages.
  • Internal Company Culture: Emily recalls a story about LinkedIn's failed "frank conversation" on race, which descended into anonymous racism—proof that internal problems run deep.
  • Meritocracy Myth: Stacey cites backlash at Google and other tech companies, where discussing structural racism or instituting DEI programs is still often resisted.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "It's difficult to have a policy conversation unless we agree on the reality of the diagnosis." – Stacey [18:51]
• "How do you undo 400 years by saying, okay, we're going to tweak things here and there, like, it doesn't seem possible..." – Ana [24:13]
• "Even the current tax code is set up to reward people who own assets that other folks... have been disenfranchised from..." – Stacey [30:12]
• "Honestly, I think that companies donating money is total bullshit." – Emily [41:32]
• "There is a really substantial difference between PR... and things that are actual change in a corporate context." – Stacey [40:18]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:22]–[09:57] — May Jobs Report: Surprises, Interpretations, and Equity Implications
• [13:52]–[18:51] — Black Lives Matter, Economic Disparity, and Historical Context
• [18:51]–[24:28] — Diagnosing Inequality, Policy Interventions, and Structural Barriers
• [24:28]–[31:28] — Reparations: Historic Debts and Policy Solutions
• [31:40]–[35:30] — Numbers Round: Texas Tracers, US Unemployment, Brazil Policing, LEGO Donations
• [38:21]–[45:44] — Corporate Donations, Diversity Statements, and Real vs. Performative Change

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Overall Tone

The conversation is open, analytical, at times frustrated and wry, but consistently committed to realism and meaningful action over platitude—especially regarding racial justice, economic recovery, and the role of public and private institutions.

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This summary aims to give non-listeners a clear, full picture of the discussion, highlighting the data, expertise, and candid commentary that make this episode a rich examination of systemic economic and racial issues amid a historic moment.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign. Hello, and welcome to the systemic interventions episode of Sleep Money, your guide to the business and finance news of a big, big week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Anna Shymansky of Breaking Views. Hello. I am here with Emily Peck of HuffPost. Hello. And most excitingly, we have the best person in the world, Stacey Marie Ishmael. I think, I think it's true. Stacy Marie, you. You and I go way back. We're OG Financial bloggers. When you're the ft. And I was. I can't even remember where I was. Probably Roubini Global Economics or something like that. You went on to create the world's best ever website, which was called Fttilt rip. It was amazing. It was this great way of covering emerging markets. And then now you're in Texas. Tell me what you're up to these days.

[B]

I am the editorial director of the Texas Tribune. We are a rigorously nonpartisan media organization with a focus on issues for and about Texans.

[A]

So I'm very excited about this because it gives me another excuse to get back to Austin if ever any of.

[B]

Us get on planes again.

[A]

If we ever get on planes again. So, yeah, congratulations on the new job, which you've had for how long?

[B]

Now, I started in March. I started right before the stay at home order in Austin. So I have not met half the people on my team in person.

[A]

I mean, given how key the eating of vast amounts of restaurant food in general and tacos and barbecue in particular is to your job, you've got a lot of catching up to do.

[B]

There is. I mean, I remember this was like never tweet things into the universe. A couple of days when I landed, I had been asking people, what are the best tacos I should eat? Where's the best breakfast taco? What are the best bike shops? I had one breakfast taco before everything shut down. And I'm just really sad about this.

[A]

So we are going to talk about the May jobs report, which was a shocker. We are going to talk about the Black Lives Matter protests. We are going to talk about reparations. We are going to talk about corporate donations. We are going to talk about how liberalism and progressive policies manifests itself in various different types of companies. We have a packed episode for you this week and I hope you stay tuned for the Slate plus because there's great stuff in that. So all of that is coming up on Slate Money. So the big finance and economics news of the week is definitely this absolute bombshell of unemployment report which did the exact opposite of what everyone thought it would do. And apparently two and a half million jobs were created in May in the middle of a lockdown. How we managed that, I have no idea. The unemployment rate fell to 13.3%. Stacey, you are in Texas. Texas was early on the reopening bandwagon. Like, can you even conceptualize how this is possible?

[B]

I admit I was genuinely mystified this morning when I saw the, the report from the Department of Labor. And there was one caveat in there that I thought was super interesting, which is around, I think it was that the unemployment rate would be 3 percentage points higher if the data had been accurate and that some of the jobs that were classified as layoffs were furloughs and furloughs were absenteeisms. And so there is some messiness in this, in the way that there has to be.

[A]

There is, but I need to jump in and just say that was true last month too.

[B]

Oh, for sure. It's consistently wrong in the same direction.

[A]

What we're talking about here is people who were absent from work for, quote, unquote, other reasons.

[B]

Other reasons. Exactly.

[A]

And most economists, pretty much all economists, would agree that those people should be classed as being temporarily furloughed and should be added to the unemployment figures. They weren't for various statistical reasons, which we can either agree or disagree with. But as you say, that was true in April, that was true in May. The unemployment rate fell enormously. Either way, if you include it or if you don't include it, I mean.

[C]

A lot of people went back to work. I think it's not as complicated as we need to make it. Although I did see, of course on Twitter speculation of Trump rigging the numbers. I feel, I feel actually pretty confident that that is not correct. And no, no conspiracy.

[A]

Of course there's no conspiracy. I'm old enough to remember October 2012 when Jack Welch accused Obama of rigging the numbers. And it wasn't true then and it's not true now.

[C]

So what I'm saying is I think people went back to work. They were in a lot of cases forced back to work because, you know, states wanted to get back open as fast as they can. And, and, and that's what happened. People went back. That's my theory.

[D]

Well, I think one thing that's interesting, if you kind of look into the data, like about 40% of it was part time labor, which really isn't overly surprising. Kind of thinking about the people who are going to be hired back as companies kind of try to Figure out the labor that they're actually going to need moving forward. It was also interesting to look a little bit into demographics, I would say.

[B]

Particularly the African American reit.

[D]

Yes. Because it didn't. It didn't.

[C]

Didn't move.

[B]

No, it didn't move.

[A]

No, it went up. The unemployment for African Americans went up to 16.6.8%, while everyone else. Actually, the Asian unemployment rate went up as well, but the overall unemployment rate went down. So given the context we're in, we should. We should definitely talk about that. Interestingly, this is the first unemployment report ever, at least that I can remember, where the African American unemployment rate was not the highest. The Hispanic and Latino unemployment rate is now 17.6%. It's even higher than the black unemployment rate. But the one big caveat we need to apply to all of this is this is a survey of absolutely extreme and unprecedented economic conditions. And the kind of stuff surveying and polling and modeling that you do to create these numbers was never designed to capture this kind of economic condition with great accuracy. So there's a huge amount of, like, error bars. The error bars on all of these numbers are much bigger than they normally would be.

[D]

Yeah. Although I would say, though, that it is. It's not insignificant, though.

[A]

I mean, it's not in definitely significant.

[D]

100% significant, because it does show that. I mean, whole. Hopefully, even though the levels are still horrible, the direction seems less negative than we thought it was going to be. And I think that that's good. I mean, I think it indicates that perhaps we will be able to recover slightly faster than we would have thought a few weeks ago. Maybe not as fast as we thought two months ago, but that's still positive.

[A]

So the Paul Krugman response to that when he was on Twitter after the report came out is basically, this is actually bad news because the way that we recover more quickly is through the government really throwing the kitchen sink at trying to. The German model, trying to get the economy going again. And if it looks like the economy is getting better on its own, then that means the government isn't going to do anything. And if the government doesn't do anything, that's bad.

[C]

That's. I was just gonna say that I think this is gonna be really bad. We already had President Trump tweeting about the great jobs numbers. So this. And we already have Republicans and conservatives saying, you know, we don't want to do the $600 extra benefits once they expire in July. We're done with that. They want to push people back to work. And so now they have this great quote, unquote great news. But it's not great news. It's what, 13, what is it? 13.3% unemployment. That's wildly high. Like you can't. This is good news.

[A]

20%, if you look at the U6, the broad measure of people who are wanting work.

[C]

And then you think about the African American rate not having budged at all and you pull out all the fiscal stimulus and you have a real explosion of inequality in this country. I think it's bad news.

[B]

I mean, if we want to compound the bad news, one of the other things that we are about to start to get early indicators on is what was the effect of increased reopening on the rates of transmission and hospitalizations. Right. And if there is indeed the second wave, as folks have been describing it, what is that going to mean for all the places that have just reopened? Is everyone going to close? What does it mean right now that you have curfews, which is definitely hampering economic activity. You have restricted public transit, People can't get to work, essential workers being arrested if they try to get home. I think there's like all different kinds of things that are affecting not just the suitability of the surveys to capture this, but just like the general understanding of the picture of how business and employers are being affected by what's going on right now.

[A]

One of the ways that people described this report was consider a restaurant which laid everyone off in March when the pandemic hit, and then come May sort of reopened in a very, very stripped down way for like takeout only and hired back one third of its workers. That's effectively what the figures are showing, that roughly one third of the people who lost their jobs in the April report managed to get them back in the May report. It's not good. So Stacey, as you say, this whole curfew situation just makes it worse. That hypothetical restaurant wouldn't be allowed to serve anything in the middle of a curfew. One of my friends favorite factoids about this present level of complete insanity is New York City has not had a curfew since 1943, in the middle of the Second World War. And even then it was basically just half of Harlem. Right now it's the entire city and it's going on for a week.

[C]

We've really been through, I mean, just to pull back a little. Like at first there was this pandemic and it was like everyone needs to stay home, everyone stay home, go nowhere. Then there was this like panic like, okay, we need to open back up. Everyone get out, go, go back to doing normal stuff. And now it's like, no, no, nevermind, curfew, Go, go back home. It's like, what do you want from us?

[B]

Help.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, and I think, you know, what we're seeing in these jobs numbers does not necessarily indicate that we're going to see that same every month. And I think that, Stacey, I also think you're right that we don't know what the impact is going to be of what we're seeing now and it likely won't be good. I think that that is definitely true, though, just in general, I'd say that the idea that because we're at this point means that we won't get any more government help moving forward and that the Republicans will be able to say, no, we're done. I don't really think that I agree with that. Just because you still have levels that are so much higher than anything we've seen in decades and decades and decades. This is an election year. I still think you will get a lot of angry rhetoric coming out of Republicans, but I think at the end of the day they still will do something.

[A]

So, Stacey Marie, I want to put that question to you as someone who has looked at probably more elections than anyone else around these parts, in many, many different countries around the world, when it comes to elections, what is more important, the unemployment rate or the change in the unemployment rate? If the unemployment rate is high and going down, is that good for the incumbent or bad for the incumbent?

[B]

The way that I would nuance, that is, I would say who is most directly affected by the unemployment rate and do those people have savings? It's your qualitative understanding of your ability to live your life. And there are circumstances, including in this data in U6, where some of the people who have been affected got severance pay. Some of the people who have been affected were able to move to part time. They are not a single earner household. And interestingly, in the US a lot of the people who are affected the most are also effectively disenfranchised and may not necessarily be able to represent how they are feeling economically at the ballot box for a host of reasons which would take an entire other podcast to discuss. And so I think in general the real unemployment rate really matters. I also think in the US particularly in the context of the upcoming presidential elections, that the effect of the real unemployment rate might not be matched by someone's ability to cast their votes as to how they feel about it.

[A]

So that is the perfect segue to Black Lives Matter and the way that the US Economy is rigged against black and brown folks, which is a large part, but of course not even the main part of the reason why there have been so many protests across the country. Stacy, tell us. We don't have an entire podcast about this, but we do have an entire segment if you want it. So let's try and give us the big picture background of what has been going on with the economics of African Americans and why is it not getting any better?

[B]

I'm just going to take a deep breath. The protests currently are not only about the economics of African Americans, but they are certainly representative of widespread and profound dissatisfaction with the inequality of opportunity that an entire segment of the population is currently facing. And whether you think about the historic wealth patterns of African American households over time, there was a stat that I saw, maybe it was yesterday, that it would take your average white household has the wealth of 9 to 11 African American households combined.

[A]

And that's with the same income.

[B]

That's with the same income.

[A]

That's a middle class household with like $65,000 annual income has like seven or eight times as much wealth as an African American household with the same income.

[B]

As expressed through the levels of homeownership and the value of that home as expressed through levels of access to credit and means of borrowing.

[D]

Right.

[B]

As expressed through gener generational wealth transfers. The African American population on all economic metrics can be considered fairly to be significantly disadvantaged. And you compound that by, as we are seeing right now, a system in which those disadvantages intersect in extremely fraught ways with policing and the state. Right. That if you are in a position in which your options for employment or unemployment, as the case may be, or the way that you are treated in school and the likelihood of you graduating successfully without having been suspended at between five and 10 times the rate of a non black student and the fact that in schools you have an increasing police presence. It is genuinely systemic the ways in which economic opportunity is limited for a lot of folks in this population.

[C]

Yeah. One stat that really I think I read it before in Mercer Bharatiran's book a few years ago when enslaved people were emancipated, black people owned about 0.5% of all the wealth in the United States, which makes sense. But now today, and I like emailed her to double check, black people own about 1.1% of all the wealth in the United States.

[B]

So several hundred years after the end of slavery.

[C]

Yeah, it just Ticked up slightly. I mean, it's just absolutely shocking.

[A]

One of the lessons of that book is that weirdly, economically speaking, things just got in weird ways worse after the end of slavery, once all of the Jim Crow institutions started coming in, that like the whole 40 acres and mule thing lasted what, like three years before it all got like, ripped back and African Americans were just not allowed to buy property, were not allowed to own land, were systematically excluded from all of the jobs that paid well. And the echoes of that throughout history are unbelievably strong. And one of the things you see across the world is that if certain segments of the population, whether they're demographic or geographic, have historically underperformed for whatever reasons, but it's usually tribal or racial in some way, those things persist for centuries. Like the difference in income and wealth between southern Italy and northern Italy, for instance, has persisted for centuries, even though women have, you know, they all speak the same language, they can move freely back and forth, but it's still there. It's really, really hard to eradicate this kind of thing, which doesn't mean that we shouldn't and we shouldn't try. So I'd love to ask Stacey Marie about this. What is the public policy solution to this problem?

[B]

One of the things I believe very strongly is that it's difficult to have a policy conversation unless we agree on the reality of the diagnosis. And the reality of the diagnosis is, is that this thing exists, this disparity exists, these substantial gaps in median net worth, these substantial gaps in educational outcomes, the fact that you can be a black professional with a college degree and your lifetime earnings are lower than a white person with only a high school education. I feel that from a policy perspective, we have to start with, do we accept these as facts? If yes, here's how we go forward. And I accept these as facts. I'm a big fan of data analysis and I think there are specific interventions, whether at the point of no longer considering policies that were designed to redress some of these disparities, particularly in education, namely affirmative action, for example, are somehow a question of a system that is not meritocratic but in the wrong direction and are more like, this is a policy intervention with very specific goals in order to address historical wrongs, or the fact of how black households have access to wealth through home ownership and the decades long system of redlining is something that is ripe for a policy intervention. The Community Reinvestment act is constantly on the verge of not being a thing, being a thing, being gutted in some different way. The fact that we are having discussions around, I think it was two years ago when ProPublica was doing reporting on Facebook allowing digital redlining because it was allowing, through its advertising, people who were identified by those algorithms as black or Hispanic to be targeted with really predatory lending, really predatory and exclusionary job ads. That is also something where there is an ability to have a policy intervention. I don't think there is one single thing that any particular administration or mayor or governor can do, because this is a systemic problem, and you have to treat systemic problems with systemic interventions. But I do think the conversation around the need for these interventions is one that has been sort of muddied by making it a question of like, oh, are you saying that everything is racist? And it's like, yes. And the policies, the effects of these policies are disparate racial outcomes. And so that is how we have to understand what we are talking about.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I think you have to really go back to the roots. I mean, one reason there's such a wide wealth gap is because there was an intentional policy in the United States during the New Deal that purposefully excluded black people. White people were given opportunities. They were given, what, billions, trillions of dollars in support to go buy houses and get mortgages that were backed, you know, with the full faith and credit of the United States. And black people didn't get any of that. And we're still dealing with that right now. Like, in the 60s, there was, you know, civil rights, there was protests, and there was a few laws passed to sort of say, like, well, going forward, we won't. We won't do that anymore. But there was no redress going backwards. So all that wealth had been built and that purposeful exclusion kind of continue forward. And there needs to be like a.

[B]

Real.

[C]

Sort of like a reckoning in. In the United States at the federal level, at the policy level, at the agency level, in all these ways that black people were purposefully prevented from building wealth for decades and decades and decades, really centuries. And if you don't do that and fix those programs and go back and give African American people what white people were given a long time ago, it doesn't get fixed.

[B]

I mean, I was thinking the other day around, you know, we've had a fresh round of discussions on the utility and necessity of the Postal Service.

[D]

Right.

[B]

And the Postal Service is an excellent example of a government agency that has also historically been a path for black people into, like, the professional class or the middle class. And that the gutting of the Postal Service disproportionately affects black households. And it's the kind of thing where on the front end, you're like, oh, no, we're having a discussion about what it, you know, should this be a private sector company? Actually, I'm like, actually, what you're having a conversation about is the infrastructure that supports what limited amounts of black wealth there is in the United States being, you know, systematically defunded in ways that are not always visible.

[D]

And going back from, you know, frankly, even before the Declaration of Independence, you know, like, moving on, you know, at every single stage, the only way that America did anything was basically by saying, okay, well, we will sacrifice African Americans in order to get Southern votes. Like, this is something that you just, in American history, just see over and over and over. And. And to me, this is like, goes into discussions then of reparations because it does seem like, how do you undo 400 years by saying, okay, we're going to tweak things here and there, like, it doesn't seem possible without saying, no, look, this country was built on unpaid labor that's incurred a lot of interest over the years. It should be paid out. I mean, it still doesn't undo everything. Obviously, money can't undo all harms, you know, a lot of this.

[A]

But.

[B]

But it certainly makes those harms easier to bear.

[A]

So let's talk a little bit more about reparations. Since this seems to be the obvious endpoint. There are two questions I have about reparations. One, is the. Is it possible to, for those of us who live in, like, urban centers with lots of woke protesters coming around, for us to massively overestimate the support for any kind of reparations at all? And two, assuming that there is support for reparations, where do you start and what do they look like? That was, of course, famously the question that was kind of dodged by Ta Nehisi Coates in his big Case reparations article. He was like, here's the case for reparations, and then let's just leave it to the policy wonks to work out how to do it. Which is fine. But there were some interesting ideas. If you look at the Democratic debates, there were some interesting ideas about where you might start with that kind of a thing. And I'd be interested, Stacey, and what you thought of the kind of things that Kamala Harris and others were putting forward.

[B]

Yeah, so I was just double checking. So HR 40.

[C]

Right.

[B]

That's the bill that was introduced on the commission to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans. Act sponsored by a Texas Rep, Sheila Jackson Lee. And I think that studying is the correct and wise starting point, because I think that what you are looking at, there are different ways of tackling this you could start from. And this is one of, you know, one of the more popular, in as much as any of these things, are popular proposals. Looking at land theft, I believe that it was the New Yorker that had a series a little while ago about how African American families were systematically removed from the family land that they had owned or earned or tilled, and how that has really negatively affected the ability to pass on and do any kind of generational wealth transfer. And it's something where you have receipts, right? Like there's paper trails, there's deeds, there's history, there's records, there's ways of saying we have very clear documentation that demonstrates that the rightful owners of this land is this household or this collection of households. And I think that what people often worry about with reparations is that, oh, you know, you're just like giving money to everyone. I mean, like, one, yes. And two, you are giving money to everyone on the basis, to your point, Ana, of historical wrongdoing and that you are trying to address and correct. So it's an intervention for past harm and not sort of a reward for existing. And so I'm a big fan of proposals that start with what are clear and clearly documented examples that lend themselves to fairly swift, as much as any of these things are ever swift repair.

[C]

I like the idea. I again spoke to Marisa because she tweeted something like, the policy solution we need to do is reparations. So I called her and said, like, what do you. What kind. What does that look like? So she said was talking about how the creation of the FHA and how white people got, you know, mortgages backed by the United States or the Homestead Act. You know, white people got just like free land back in the day. And she said, maybe we can do like, an equivalent policy now where like, African American people get free land, essentially are given grants of housing and houses, and made a real effort to like, give property back to people. She also mentioned, like, the Department of Education could work on student loan forgiveness, especially at historic black colleges and universities and things like that. Just sort of like targeted ways to allow more wealth creation essentially instead of just like sending someone a check, maybe like giving people the opportunity to have a house or have a free college education. That could really spur a lot of wealth creation and undo some damage.

[A]

The land and housing aspect of this is the through line here. And it makes perfect sense because as we talked about the a lot of the wealth and income disparities come back to land and housing disparities that like, underlies a lot of it. And it's absolutely clear, historically speaking, where those, what the structurally racist institutions were that created those disparities in the first place. And as we hand Colanderity on this year talking about his housing book, there is an incredibly massive demand in the economy as a whole, just as a macroeconomic question for more housing and especially more affordable housing and housing for, you know, the lower middle classes in particular and who don't really vote in the same numbers that the upper middle classes do. And so they, they tend to be more ignored during elections. But this housing is desperately needed. And it seems that just from a fiscal policy point of view, it would make a huge amount of sense to create a huge amount of housing and give it to people who were deprived of it in the first go round.

[B]

I feel like this is the second time this week I've been thinking about the mortgage interest deduction for someone who doesn't own a house. But it's like even the current tax code is set up to reward people who own assets that other folks largely have been disenfranchised from the ability to access. And it's just like there are so many places and so many policies that people are like, yeah, obviously you're like, no, there's no reason that this is obvious. There's lots of reasons actually why it's non obvious. And that's what I really like. I would just love for the conversation to get down to the brass tacks of here are clear examples of the ways that we are not just introducing but reinforcing disparities and that we take those things for granted.

[A]

Although can I give probably the first and last time I'll ever give Trump credit for anything he did more or less abolish the mortgage interest deduction. It exists on paper, but the number.

[B]

Of people has substantially reduced, plunged. But the compounding effect of having had that for so long when you didn't have access to that if you were a renter and the reason that you were a renter was because you were priced out of your neighborhood in Oakland where you had previously owned a house and no longer could afford to is just like insult to injury.

[A]

Let's have a numbers round. We should throw some numbers at each other, keep it light. Stacy, I'm sure you have an upbeat number which you all cheer us all up.

[B]

So one of the Big parts of Governor Abbott, who is of course the governor of Texas, what he called his reopening metrics was this notion that by June 1st, which was of course four days ago at the point of recording, there would be up to 4,000 contact tracers in Texas, focused on making sure that we are minimizing community spread, that we are understanding if there are particular areas where the rate of infection might go up, encouraging people to self quarantine, all of those good things. But we only have 2,900 and we're past June 1st. And I think that the reason that number stood out to me is 4,000 wasn't that high in the first place for a state with the population of Texas. And contact tracing is very labor intensive to do correctly, aside from all of the challenging privacy considerations. And so for us to be five days into June and still down versus what was a very moderate benchmark, I think is another signal of the ways in which our attempts to manage a global pandemic with statewide interventions or state level interventions has been really challenging.

[A]

I think my number, my number was going to be 20, which is like the number of allegedly fake dollars that sparked this entire wave of protests. But that was too depressing even for me. So I think I'm going to do only mildly depressing number, which is 21 million, which is the closest thing we have to an actual number of unemployed people. The one of the things that has really struck me over the past couple months is that there has been this enormous range of people talking about how many people have lost their jobs over the course of this pandemic. And one of the things that people do is they add up weekly unemployment claims figures, which is a terrible thing to do. Do not do that. And the only thing we can really do is wait for the monthly employment report to come out and just take the number from that. It's inaccurate and kind of dirty number in a bunch of ways, but it's the best thing we have. And so the new number that you can basically say this is the number of unemployed people in America is now officially 20,985,000.

[D]

So there's that at least. Start with data. Start with good data. Good in one sense, not good in every sense. But I have a very depressing number.

[A]

So I feel like, what's your depressing number?

[D]

My number is six. So in Rio de Janeiro, the police killed an average of 6 people a day in April. And that is actually an over 40% increase from April last year. And this was at a time when actually overall Crime was decreasing because more people were at home. The numbers are just crazy when you, you know, it's just kind of another example. Like, I think it was like almost 10,000 people in Rio have been killed by the police over the past decade. And over 75% of them are Afro Brazilians who make up the majority of Brazil, yet hold a teeny tiny percentage of, you know, executive positions and wealth. And so it's just, it's another example of a place where things are horrible. And also, I have an incredibly horrible president.

[A]

Brazil has only ever had white presidents. It's kind of amazing that even the leftists who get elected in Brazil, people like Dilma and Lula, are still white.

[D]

The amount of discrimination, I mean, the history of racism in Latin America and in Brazil especially, it's really, truly awful.

[A]

Emily.

[C]

I had a lot of depressing numbers written down, but the most cheerful one I have is $4 million. And that is the amount of money LEGO has donated. I'm not sure. I didn't write down to what, to causes in light of the protests and all that. And it also represents the amount of money they're not going to spend marketing their police LEGO kits. So they make like all kinds of adorable LEGO kits and some of them are like cute little police officers, but there's nothing really that cute about police officers right now or maybe ever. And so anyway, and, and this was reported in a very confusing way. So a lot of people initially thought LEGO was saying they weren't going to make the police officer kits anymore. That is not what they said. They're just not going to market them so much. So everything is not awesome, I guess.

[D]

Saw what you did there.

[A]

I mean, I see what you did there. I don't even have kids and I see what you did there. I want to talk a little bit about this whole trend of companies and individuals donating money to various causes as these protests rage and like, which causes it makes sense to donate money to and what we can, what we think of this sort of latest wave of donations. So I'm one of them. I have to admit, I was like, I. I feel like going out and marching around is, is insufficient. Anything I do is insufficient, but I should at least give some money to someone. There was a brief period of everyone giving money to bail funds, but a lot of the bail funds are now coming out and saying, actually we have basically the money we need. The pro. The problem is, is more that the arrested individuals and not even appearing in court to get bail in the first place. So where I wound up giving money was to a charity advocating for repeal of something called 50A in New York State, which is this law that effectively makes it very, very difficult to not only to prosecute, but police officers for crimes, but even to find out what kind of crimes they. They had got up to in the past. But Stacy, we have seen a huge number of companies, basically every major bank, all of the big sports teams, Lego, you name it. Sort of like Facebook coming out with saying, oh, we're going to give like X million dollars to Y. What do you make of that? And what are the. And if there is a good place to give money to and a bad place to give money to. What's your view of all of this?

[B]

I have to caveat this by saying that I am professionally not giving money to anyone because this is a subject that I cover. But I have thought about the fact that it is very easy to make a marketing statement, right? This is turning into we are in. It's June, it's Pride Month. There are corporate rainbows everywhere. Every single year. Companies are like, look, it's 50% off on a thing that sparkles or we will donate X percent of our revenue on this one product for five minutes to the Trevor foundation, for example. And my concern with a lot of these statements about Black Lives Matter and we are going to donate money is what are you going to do the day after you have put out the statement? What are you going to do? The people who approve this in the first place were, if you, whether it's a boardroom or a zoom call, are statistically not representative in corporate America of the people who you are currently addressing. And one of the interesting things, mostly interesting to people in media, Suizo frankly, but one of the things that we've seen in the past week is company says a thing, employees are publicly saying, yes. And also I think the phrase right now is like this, you where people are just pulling up examples of how those same companies that are saying we have to do better on diversity four years ago, six years ago, 10 years ago, issued a similar statement that's like, we have to do better on diversity. At what point do we start to understand as people and as consumers that there is a really substantial difference between PR and strategic communications designed to ensure that you are not on the wrong side of customer purchase behavior and things that are actual change in a corporate context.

[D]

I think this perhaps goes to a place where it's good when companies are doing anything, except if doing anything is a cover for not doing anything moving forward. And I would also say if companies are just going to put out statements and do kind of things, fairly BS actions, and then on the other side of their mouth, try to defund programs that would actually help people, then they're not only not part of the solution, they are very much part of the problem. And then that just leads to the idea that ultimately a lot of this is a government issue and corporate executives can do some things, but they can only do so much.

[B]

I mean, corporate executives have a lot of access to those government officials.

[D]

No, I agree. And I. I actually wrote a piece on this where I just, like, if corporate executives really care about this, then they will use that power that they're currently using to give themselves massive salaries or an extra corporate jet. They will use that power to do things that actually their shareholders might push back on. They will use it to do things that some of their white shareholders might not be happy with. That would show me that they actually care and they're willing to actually do something because they do have a lot of power. Whether it's good or bad. They do. But will they actually use that? If I had to bet on it, I probably would say no.

[C]

I mean, I think they're using their actual power to lobby against the very policies that would actually help black people in this country. Like, how many big corporations that sent out emails to me telling me how much they support Black Lives Matter, like, how many oppose, like, say, raising the minimum wage? I mean, we saw big companies just recently push back so hard on paid sick leave and paid family leave that they were entirely left out of those of those laws when they were. They were passed. I mean, it's cool. I honestly think that companies donating money is total bullshit. I mean, I think it makes sense for Felix to donate money and for us to donate money, but at the corporate level, there are real things that they could do to actually affect widespread change. I mean, even if you don't want to talk about lobbying for policies, I mean, just look in your own house, right? I mean, look at the percentage of people of color that are actually in management or at the executive level. It's, like, actually minuscule. And then, like, there's a story that the Daily Beast put out last night about LinkedIn, which they had like a. An open. Did you see this?

[B]

Oh, yeah. Oh, they're all hands, like, getting, like, a stress flashback to reading it. You know, you mentioned LinkedIn.

[A]

But wait, wait, so bring us up to speed on this story.

[C]

Before, like, a lot of companies, LinkedIn decided to have, like, a Frank conversation about race and like, to facilitate the conversation, let people chat anonymously with each other about the subject. And it was just like a cesspool of racism. Like a shocking amount, maybe not shocking to everyone, but a disgusting amount of really vile things being said under the COVID of anonymity. It's sort of more, if you pull back more, just sort of like, takes the lid off the fact, like, these companies can send out their messages and they can tweet their tweets, but, like, inside the house, it's messy there. Like, fix that. Yeah.

[B]

I mean, let's go back to the Google walkouts, right? One of the things the tech has been grappling with for several years is that one, there is a strong perception that politicians especially like to spread that the employees of tech companies are somehow universally liberal. For whatever definition of liberal those folks are using. That is not supported by the examples of political donations and campaign donations coming from the executives of those companies, coming from the employees of those companies, the causes they lobby for. To your earlier point, it's also not supported by the absolute uninterrupted string of examples of all of the ways in which these are not somehow bastions of harmony. And I think the LinkedIn example is one. But Google @ the corporate level stopped one of its diversity programs, or it was reported a couple of weeks ago, I'm not sure the timeline when it stopped, it called Sojourn, which was supposed to be about fostering precisely these kinds of conversations and interventions, partly because it was perceived as being too indulgent of people from underrepresented backgrounds. And one of the things that came up repeatedly in that LinkedIn story was folks insisting, well, if it's a meritocracy, why do we have to care about race? And it's this inability within those organizations to grapple with, again, inequality of access and inequality of outcomes, and that those things have a racial dimension and that having that conversation is not in and of itself racist. Which is one of the other things that you hear these companies being accused of, which is like, if you have a diversity program, you are discriminating against white people. And despite going back to the point about affirmative action, so many studies that show the people who are the primary benefits of affirmative action are, in fact, white women in, you know, like, the college infrastructure in the United.

[A]

States. Stacy Marie, thank you for joining us from Austin.

[B]

Texas. My.

[A]

Pleasure. Thank you to Jessamine and Molly for producing this, and thank you to all of you guys for writing in on slatemoneylate.com. we love your emails and talk to you next week on Sleep.