The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News, my name is Doug Henwood.

In a hair-raising off-road experience, we've got three guests today.

Neil Saggle will tell us about the persistence of slaveholder wealth by a look at members of Congress.

Emily Jishinsky will offer a conservative view of the election, and Melissa Arnold Lion will

analyze the effects of teacher strikes.

Time is tight, so only a few words from me. Some people have a hard time

accepting the fact that slavery has left a very durable mark in American society. Here's further

evidence that it has. My first guest, Neil Saggle, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania,

is a co-author along with his father, Ashwini Saggle, an MD who does research a case Western reserve, of a paper showing that members of Congress who have slaveholders in their family history

are substantially richer than those that didn't.

Aside from a story about the durability of slavery, it's also a story about the durability of wealth.

Neil Seagull.

First, how did you go about this work?

What were the information sources?

We kind of relied on two data sets that had been compiled by journalists. One was its report from Reuters, which was kind of the inspiration for the study in the first place.

Last year Reuters did this big report where they took all of the Congress people in the Congress session for 2021 to 2023 and they basically did this big report on who was and who wasn't a descendant of

slaveholders and they did this by looking at census records and a lot of other

historical records they had genealogists help them verify everything

I mean they basically identified identified that 100 out of the 535 Congress members were direct descendants of slaveholders.

And then separately, we needed to combine this with data on wealth.

And so Congress members are required to disclose their finances annually,

but they do this in a way where it's hard for people to access the data.

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