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Planet Money

The Lost Archives of Sadie Alexander

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.629.8K Ratings

🗓️ 27 August 2021

⏱️ 23 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The work of our first Black economist was lost to history. Professor Nina Banks set out on a quest to find it. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Just a heads up, this is the second of two stories we're doing this summer about the economist

0:04.3

Sadie Alexander, but you do not need to have heard the first story to enjoy this one.

0:08.8

You can listen to that one later.

0:10.4

All right, here's the show.

0:12.5

This is Planet Money from NPR.

0:17.9

There was a single piece of writing that changed the way we think about economic history and

0:24.1

completely changed the life of Professor Nina Banks. It was an essay published in

0:29.9

1991 in the American Economic Review. It's called Mist Opportunity.

0:35.6

Mist Opportunity was about Sadie Alexander. The essay told the story of how Sadie was the first

0:41.8

black woman to receive a PhD in economics in the US in 1921. But when she tried to get a job in

0:48.7

the field, she was functionally shut out. So Sadie Alexander went back to school and became an

0:54.4

attorney, a very important civil rights attorney. The thinking was that when she became a practicing

0:59.1

attorney and she had a very distinguished and important career as an attorney, that she had lost

1:05.1

interest in economics, that was pretty much the end of the conversation.

1:08.5

And this essay argued that Sadie Alexander represented a huge missed opportunity for economics.

1:15.3

Had things been different, there would have been this whole body of economic research that Sadie

1:19.8

would have contributed to the field. Especially when you consider the one major piece of research that

1:25.3

she had done while still in economics, her PhD thesis. Yeah, for this thesis, Sadie Alexander looked

1:32.2

at the economic conditions of black families that were moving from the south to Philadelphia as part

1:38.0

of the great migration. It was a massive undertaking with tons of data, intimate interviews with people

1:45.0

about their finances. It was focused on this corner of the world that other economists were ignoring.

1:51.2

And as Nina Banks read about all this in the essay, it spoke to her personally. She also was a

...

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