Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is July 2, 2020, and my guest is economist and author Glenn Laury of Brown University,

where he is the Burton Peace Stoltz professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics.

Glenn, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thank you, Russ. Good to be with you.

I want to start with the issue you examine in your 2018 lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse,

which we will link to, the persisting subordinate position of blacks in the United States.

It's your wording. That was a lecture you gave two years ago,

in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and other deaths of blacks at the hands of police.

This issue is now deeply front and center in the United States.

A lot of people are arguing that the inequality and what you call the subordinate position of blacks in America is due to what is being described as systemic racism.

Does that phrase resonate for you at all, and if so, how and if not, why not?

I'm not a big fan of that phrase, because I think it conceals more than it actually illuminates.

I think it's a rhetorical, not a scientific claim.

I think what people have in mind when they say systemic racism is that many different kinds of processes,

like gender, political, some of them economic, some of them are social, some of them are cultural,

have had the cumulative effect of subordinating or marginalizing the descendants of the slaves,

...