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Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Hinwood, the usual two guests today.

We'll hear from the economist, Laura Duran in court on the frustratingly persistent black white wealth gap

and from David Gellis, author of a new book on Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of GE in the 1980s and 1990s, who drove the company into the ground.

Despite a massive narrowing of educational gaps and the entry of scores of millions of black Americans in the middle and upper middle class jobs,

the racial wealth gap is persisted. Why is that? And why is it important? And how is it not as some argue a mere function of class?

My first guest, Laura Duran in court, is one of four authors of a new working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research,

wealth of two nations, the US racial wealth gap 1860 to 2020.

It's fallen substantially since the Civil War, but progress stopped around 1980 and the gap remained stuck at around 6 to 1.

I should emphasize that we're talking about wealth, assets like bank accounts and stock holdings, less liabilities like mortgage and credit card debts,

and not income, which is what one takes in in salary, pension benefits, or interest and dividends over the course of a year.

Laura Duran in court is an assistant professor of economics at Princeton. Laura Duran in court.

Why does the wealth gap matter? You know, in a functioning social welfare state, ideally, wealth wouldn't matter, but we don't have one of those.

Let's just, you know, just for starters, let's start here.

In the absence of one though, wealth is what allows people to weather major negative shocks, like losing your job, illness, losing your home, being displaced because of natural disasters,

you know, any major shocks like that. And we also know that wealth plays a growing role in our political system through campaign contributions and sort of revolving door between corporations and politicians.

But there's maybe even an additional reason that we've just started, at least in economics, scraping the surface of which is that wealth likely plays a role in the labor market as well by allowing displaced workers to hold out for

the best possible match in terms of employment. And I think we're seeing a bit of that today, there's some conjecture that savings during the pandemic contributed to this tight labor market, allowing workers to sort of wait and see if they can get a better offer.

Much to the annoyance of employers.

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