Last week's episode, we started to pull on two threads that look quite different at first glance,

but if you pull hard enough, they can lead you to similar conclusions. The first story began with

the rise of women's soccer in England back in the 1920s. They attracted a crowd of 53,000 people,

which was a complete set-up crowd. And subsequently, a ban on women's soccer,

out of concern, it might cut into the men's game. I think if they hadn't been banned, women's

soccer today would be a global phenomenon. And whether something should be done to address this

ancient infraction. Well, I believe that the right artsy here is reparations. I think the soccer

authorities that grew rich with men's soccer should be diverting significant amount of their

resources into women's soccer. That was the soccer economist Stefan Shameinsky, who teaches

at the University of Michigan. Another economist, Derek Hamilton of Ohio State University,

argues in favor of reparations to address a much more complicated and painful economic disparity.

The racial wealth gap is such that the typical black family has about 10 cents on the dollar

as a typical white family. The origins of this black white wealth gap in America

clearly date back to slavery. But that history of racial disparity as it relates to wealth building

certainly didn't end with slavery. There was the homestead act. There was the GI build.

There was a system of sharecropping. There's a system of Jim Crow. There's a system of

redlining. It was government facilitated. And because government actions helped create the

wealth gap, Hamilton argues it's up to government to address it. Democrats in Congress have for a

few decades wanted to study and develop proposals for some kind of reparations. But what would reparations

look like? What form would they take? How much would they cost? Who would be eligible?

These are important questions that often get lost in the noise whenever the topic of reparations

comes up in the public sphere. The very word has become so loaded as to be reduced to a slogan

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