- COPD, pulmonary diseases
which include emphysema,
chronic bronchitis, et
cetera, are diagnosed today
and are in fact, one of the
leading causes of disability,
particularly among veterans
in the United States.
You might be surprised to
know that diagnosing COPD
requires one to infer
the race of the patient.
Why would they need to eyeball
the race of the patient?
In 1869, Gould publishes a study
that claims, using veterans
from the Civil War,
that African Americans have
lower lung capacity than whites.
And what this means is that if a white
and an African American
have the same diagnostic
result from a spirometer,
the African American is much less likely
to be diagnosed as having
COPD than a white person
based upon this 1869 study
that blacks have lower
lung capacity than whites.
So this still affects the diagnosis
of a medical condition for disability
outside of the military.
Today it's still based upon
that same body of research.
My name is Trevon Logan,
I'm a professor of economics
at the Ohio State University
and a research associate
at the National Bureau
of Economic Research.
When it comes to racial
segregation in the United States,
there's typically a standard story.
We have to begin where America begins,
which is with enslavement.
So after emancipation,
when of course we have
for the very first time
the vast majority of the
African American population
has some freedom to choose the
location of their residence,
we begin this process of
racial residential segregation.
So segregation begins almost by design
in the founding of the Republic
because you have a large
enslaved population
whose living situation
is controlled by others.
But once we begin the process of freedom,
we see that there is
significant racial separation
by races that intensifies over time.
The traditional narrative though is one
where African Americans left rural areas,
which themselves were highly segregated,
and moved to urban areas
in the Great Migration,
northern cities we think of
as Rust Belt cities today,
say, Cleveland, New York,
Minneapolis-Saint Paul,
Chicago, and others.
And those areas therefore
subsequently experienced
white flight, where white residents
moved to suburban communities
with not only formed
racially segregated communities
where whites and blacks
weren't living together,
but where whites also created
their own municipalities.
And in those municipalities,
they did not have to share public goods
with African Americans in addition.
So this would include schools,
police forces, et cetera.
And the segregation in the United States,
racial residential
segregation reaches its peak
in the 1970s, and it's declined since then
but it is still higher
than the historical levels
that we measure for urban
areas, say, circa 1880 or 1890.
That's the traditional
interpretation of segregation.
But there are two issues
that are sort of left outside of that
or at least implicitly
assumed to be true in that.
The first is that
segregation in rural areas
that African Americans
were leaving is a given,
and it's largely unchanging over time.
And the second is that
this level of segregation
is measured for urban areas
and may or may not apply
to rural areas over time.
So in my research, one of the
things that I've investigated
is a new measure of segregation
which incorporates rural communities.
In particular, this
measure looks at the race
of your next door neighbor, so
it is at the most micro way,
a micro-level that you can measure
racial residential segregation.
And what we find in that measure,
for the first time we can look
at racial residential segregation
in the entire United States,
and we can look at it over time,
at least into the middle
of the 20th century
with complete count census data.
And we found surprisingly that rural areas
were just as segregated as urban areas,
and they also experienced
increasing segregation over time.
So it isn't the case that
segregation in rural areas
did not have any changing features to it
and that African Americans were living
on a black side of town
in a rural community
and simply moved then to urban areas
which were themselves experiencing
increasing segregation.
Even the areas that African
Americans were migrating from
were themselves separating by race.
And you can think about this
in sort of the likelihood
or the probability that a black person
lives next door to a white person.
This declines by more than 25%
over time, from 1880 to 1940.
So the traditional way we
think about segregation
is being a rural, as
something that doesn't change
in rural areas and being
largely an urban phenomena
is actually only part of the story.
Segregation is a nationwide
trend that is not just due
to white flight to suburban
communities in urban areas,
it's something that's happening
even in rural areas in the United States,
and that's also intensifying over time.
So one question that people might have is,
how does a residential
segregation measure work
and what are the different ways
we can measure segregation?
Typically we measure segregation
for urban communities
and we do it by basically taking a city,
say, we take Chicago or New York,
and we cut it into very
small boxes, and these boxes
can either be census
blocks or census tracts.
What we do with those blocks
is we look at the racial
proportion in those blocks,
whether the block is
say 80% African American
or 15% white or 20% white,
and we measure the racial
composition of that block
relative to the racial composition
of the entire metro area.
So a city is labeled as segregated
if there is essentially
a lot of concentration
of African Americans in a small,
relatively small number of blocks.
Or if on average, the racial
composition of these blocks
is very dissimilar to the
overall racial composition,
which then tells us that
there's some concentration
of people of a particular race
in a certain segment of
the city in these blocks.
There are some problems
with those measures.
The first is that those
measures intellectually
are actually similar to
income distribution measures,
so sort of like a Gini coefficient
where you're looking at
how much of the wealth
is held by how many people.
So what these traditional
segregation measures look at
is basically how many of the census tracts
hold all of the black people
in a particular metro area.
The first problem that we can
have with that is conceptual.
So I don't know what
census tract I live in,
I honestly don't, I just
moved, but seriously, I don't.
And even when I lived
somewhere for 15 years,
I still couldn't tell you
what census tract I lived in.
So the building block of
the segregation measure
is unknown to most people.
But I do know who my neighbor is,
I certainly know who my neighbor is.
I know what music they might like,
I might say hi to them, hi and bye,
and that might be what we
actually are thinking about
in terms of segregation.
It also links conceptually
because when we ask people
about neighborhood composition,
we literally put before them
a map of the neighborhood
and we actually place their
hypothetical household
next to other households on a street.
So when we're thinking about segregation,
we measure it in this aggregate
way due to data limitations,
but the complete count census allows us
to look at it at a much more micro-level
which is who we're actually
living next door to.
So this measure of segregation
then doesn't require
that you take an area
and break it into blocks.
And even people in rural
areas have neighbors
even if they're miles away.
That is the person who's
living closest to you.
The person who you might be
likely to ask for an assistance
in an emergency situation,
the person you might
borrow a cup of sugar from,
or today you might steal
their Wi-Fi access,
when you think about neighbors.
These are people who you're
very closely connected to
and who you may have
strong preferences about
when you're choosing where to live.
That racial composition might
matter much more than, say,
a census tract which is a large collection
of blocks or it's a neighborhood
but it's very administratively determined.
One of the questions when you develop
this segregation measure is
well, what is it good for?
So I can tell you segregation
increases over time
in rural areas, but it may not matter
for any actual outcome.
So there still is this fact
of increasing segregation
in rural areas or the fact
that there's heterogeneity
in segregation in rural areas.
Some areas, some rural areas
are in fact, very segregated
and some rural areas are
actually quite integrated.
So one question is, does
it matter for something?
And one of the first questions
that we posed to ourselves
as researchers was, let's
think about an outcome
that occurs in rural areas predominantly
although it might occur
in urban areas as well,
that we might think
will be related to, say,
segregation as we've measured it
as opposed to traditional
measures or proxies
that people have used
in previous research.
So we began thinking about segregation
and southern lynching.
Lynching as recorded in
the data begins in 1882
and lasts until 1930
in the most widely used
lynching data available.
And our segregation
measure begins in 1880.
So we're measuring segregation
before we can measure lynching.
And what we found in that
project is that segregation
has a very strong and positive
relationship to lynching.
In the segregation measure,
a one standard deviation
increase in segregation
leads to an additional lynching
in a particular county.
And this means that
segregation in rural areas
which we, once again, had no measure for,
didn't think really
mattered for something,
actually shows to have a
very strong correlation
with a very real material outcome
that's related to racial conflict.
Which of course, is something
that we think segregation might capture
or a variation in
segregation might capture.
So when we found that,
we wanted to link it then
to some existing theories,
because of course,
before we developed this measure,
there wasn't a way of
capturing rural segregation.
Now, economists would
view this relationship
between segregation and lynching
as not being non-existent.
So lynching is about, it's economic power,
it's about the share of African Americans
in say, particular occupations,
and racial composition might matter
but not racial sorting itself.
If you're thinking in the
sociological relationship,
it would actually be negative
because segregation in
fact, racial separation
could be a substitute for
other forms of reinforcing
say, white supremacy or racial hierarchy.
It's in political theory that we find
that our empirical result actually matches
with some theory of social science theory
of the relationship between
racial violence and segregation.
And in the political theory
is where there's a political
threat for African Americans
or where you're using lynching
as a means of reinforcing
this political structure.
And that's what we find in the data
with the relationship
between racial segregation
and racial violence.
So thinking about this
long wake of segregation,
one of the big break points
clearly is emancipation.
And Reconstruction continues
to be, for me personally,
one of the most fascinating time periods
in American history.
You have one of the largest
emancipations of people
immediately from
enslavement to citizenship,
some would call it quasi-citizenship.
But enfranchisement, voting,
and political participation,
nearly instantaneously
in the United States,
it remains, I believe in world history,
one of the most dramatic political events,
moving from enslavement to
immediate full participation
in a nation's political life.
And this brings a large number
of African American politicians to power,
ranging from serving in the Senate
to the House of Representatives,
in the United States Congress,
to serving as tax administrators
at the most local level.
What we know are that over
1500 African Americans
are holding office during
the Reconstruction Era
which is around the time
of 1865 to around 1877.
What we don't know is
whether they had any effect.
And this is where the
historiography of Reconstruction
and the frankly racist assumptions made
by previous generations of historians
really hurt our ability
to inform knowledge
about this time period.
The consensus from say, the Dunning School
which was very, very, very informative
and influential among American historians
is that Reconstruction was a failure.
We certainly know that from the end
because the goals of Reconstruction
were certainly not
achieved, but in addition
to believing that
Reconstruction was a failure,
the Dunning School contained this idea
that black political leadership
was particularly ineffective
because black political
leaders were inept,
they were prone to corruption,
and they were also easily misled
or prone to participate in activities
that were not scrupulous.
And so they led to divestment of resources
and wasteful policies that
put the South backwards.
And so there was a redemption movement
where white supremacy was
reestablished in the South
and this was actually good for the South.
And I want to interrogate
that with new data
on first of all, black
political leaders themselves
and their effect on tax policy.
And what I found was that African
American political leaders
did have effects on public finance.
Where they were holding office,
there were increases in tax rates,
per person, about an
hour's wage at the time.
So there was an effective
black political leadership
and I have found in my work with them
some identification strategies,
a causal effect of black
political leadership.
But the next question is, well,
what does that black
political leadership do?
It is not the case of
black political leaders
agree or agreed at that time.
But what I found is that there was
broad agreement on two aspects.
One was land reform where they
wanted to use tax increases
to in fact, force white landholders
to break up their landholdings.
We know that the South
was a very large agricultural economy,
but what a lot of people
don't know is that the South
actually had more land and
inventory, in other words,
land that was not being
used for production
than the North before the Civil War.
And of course, those who
were formerly enslaved
know that this land is not
being put into production
and they want to use tax policy
to force it onto the market
to enable African Americans
to become landholders.
And I do find small
effects on land tenancy.
It did not lead to their tax policies,
did not lead to African
Americans becoming landholders
and we know that from
administrative landholding data
that African Americans did not.
But what it did lead to was
changing the cost of land
that African Americans in those places
where African American
politicians were holding office,
to be much more likely
to be tenants on the land
as opposed to sharecroppers,
so it did result in a material
change to their socioeconomic status.
The largest effects though
of black politicians
were on African American education.
And public education, even
though it was segregated,
was a long standing area of agreement
among black politicians.
They wanted to have access
to public education.
In fact, as Du Bois argued
in "Black Reconstruction"
nearly a century ago,
it was African American politicians
who created the public
school system in the South.
And I do find large effects
of black political leadership
on literacy among African Americans
in the Reconstruction Era.
So another aspect of looking
at the Reconstruction Era
goes back a little bit to the Civil War
which is there were a large
number of African Americans
who served in the Civil War.
And the Civil War itself
put these African Americans
who were veterans in a new capacity,
to be the recipients of federal benefits.
Amazingly, at the time
in a period of extreme racial strife,
so we know lynchings are
reaching their peak in 1890,
we know African Americans
are being disenfranchised
politically in the United States,
particularly in the South,
both de facto and de
jure disenfranchisement,
the federal government is expanding access
to pensions related to
war-related disabilities
for African American veterans.
So the first wave of
liberalization comes in 1890
which changes the pension
for Civil War veterans
from being war-related
illness and disability
to being any illness or disability,
conditional on being a veteran.
What I find in that project
is that racial
discrimination by physicians
actually is related to the pensions
that African American veterans received,
even though the pension system itself
was a race-neutral system.
And this works and we can study this
because we can look at
the differences racially
for pensions before this
liberalization of the system
because there were very
little racial differences
before when the pension
had to be allocated
based upon war-related
disability or illness.
When it moves to a period
in which physicians
have a great deal of
control over determination
of the disability and its severity,
we see a lot of racial discrimination
against African Americans,
even in a racial of control system.
When we disentangled this
in that particular project,
was looking at conditions that required
the physician to simply believe the word
of the patient, or the
veteran in this case,
or conditions that could
be verified medically.
So if you look at a condition for example
like a gastrointestinal disease,
you're telling your physician,
"I have diarrhea, I
have intestinal issues."
That's not something that
a doctor, even to this day
will be able to verify.
It's a very subjective condition.
If you tell the doctor that
I'm having for example,
cardiovascular illness, the
doctor can listen to your heart
and see if there's a problem.
What we find is that there's
really large racial disparities
in the areas for example, such
as gastrointestinal diseases
which require the physician
to simply believe the
word of their patient.
And there's much less
racial discrimination
for those sort of medical conditions
for which there have to
be, or there is some way
of medically, for determining
or a diagnostic procedure
that could actually verify the condition.
COPD, pulmonary diseases
which include emphysema,
chronic bronchitis, et cetera,
are diagnosed today and are in fact,
one of the leading causes of disability,
particularly among veterans
in the United States.
You might be surprised to
know that diagnosing COPD
requires one to infer
the race of the patient.
Diagnosing COPD requires
the use of a spirometer,
and on that machine,
what a physician must do
is eyeball the race of the patient.
Why would they need to eyeball
the race of the patient?
In 1869, Gould publishes
a study that claims,
using veterans from the Civil War,
that African Americans have
lower lung capacity than whites.
And what this means is that if a white
and an African American have
the same diagnostic result
from a spirometer, the African American
is much less likely to be
diagnosed as having COPD
than a white person based
upon this 1869 study
that blacks have lower
lung capacity than whites.
So this still affects the diagnosis
of a medical condition for disability
outside of the military.
Today it's still based upon
that same body of research.
And the same applies of
course when we're looking
at education and health
disparities and more generally,
many of these policies
actually have at their root
things that were initiated
in the late 19th century
that continue to have material effects
on racial disparities today.
But why might it matter to solve,
for economists to solve
their race problem?
I think the best way of putting
it is that as an economist,
we are developing, number one,
as an academic enterprise, truth.
Second, we need to be innovative,
to solve new problems that develop
as the economy transforms.
If we are not an inclusive
and diverse profession,
we will not reach our capacity.
As economists, we believe in efficiency
and being at the
production-possibility frontier.
If we are not an inclusive
and diverse profession,
by definition, we cannot be
at the production-possibility frontier.
We're leaving innovative
ideas outside of the scope
of economics and we're not
incorporating the best practices
and the best minds and the
best knowledge that we can.
That would mean necessarily
that we're not doing the best economics.
