Inequality
In Marker. More on Medium.
NUMBER OF THE DAY
An economist calculated the cost of racial bias, and it’s a big one
$16 trillion: That’s the additional economic output the U.S. would have generated since 2000 if it closed racial gaps, according to a report written by Dana Peterson, an economist at Citigroup, as reported in Bloomberg Businessweek.
In the 104-page report, her last as a global economist for Citi, Peterson set out to quantify the costs of failing to address racial bias in American institutions over the last two decades, motivated by her own experiences of facing racism as a Black student and professional. The report arrives at its eye-popping estimate by adding up costs from a range of institutional biases…
The chain’s flimsy commitment is a reminder that for many companies, it’s still business as usual
In early June, just as demonstrations across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s killing snowballed into a massive reset of the entire national discussion of racial equity in America and the deep and systematic socioeconomic roots of racial injustice, customers of the CVS pharmacy in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward received a text message: The location would be closing in less than two weeks.
At first I shrugged this off. There was a lot of bigger, more significant news going on. …
No Mercy / No Malice
There has never been a better time to be remarkable, nor a worse time to be unremarkable
People who note that the average American is better off than the richest person 100 years ago are, similar to someone telling you to follow your passion, already rich. The poor in the U.S. haven’t progressed much, and there is still an apartheid-like disparity in household wealth among the races.
The wealthy have done well, in a supernova kind of way. A ton has been written on this, so just one data point: The top .1% capture more wealth than the bottom 80%. For purposes of self-preservation, you’d think the uber-rich would be concerned with this level of income inequality…
No Mercy / No Malice
On the dangers of conflating luck with talent
The Dunning-Kruger effect posits that dumb people are too stupid to know they are dumb. They are not perplexed by difficult situations but overconfident — not knowing what they don’t know. As few people believe they are stupid, or a bad driver, a more relatable component of Dunning-Kruger is incorrectly believing one area of skill translates to another.
I suffer massively from this. I’m smarter than your average bear when it comes to marketing, so I’ve come to believe that makes me an expert on pretty much anything. …
