Academic Year 2003-2004
Spring 2004
William A. Darity, Jr. is the Cory C. Boshamer Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as well as the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics, and director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. An expert on the U.S. labor market and issues of job discrimination, his research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, the history of economics, and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment. He is the author of The Black Underclass: Critical Essays on Race and Unwantedness (1994) and Persistent Disparity: Race and Economic Inequality in the United States Since 1945 (1998). His talk at the Athenaeum was titled “The Economics of Reparations for African Americans.”
Lee Alston is professor of economic development at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has published numerous professional articles in such journals as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Economic History and the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. His wide-ranging interests include economic history, economic development, political economy, environmental economics and new institutional economics. Alston's book publications include two recent volumes on Titles, Conflict, and Land Use: The Development of Property Rights and Land Reform on the Brazilian Amazon Frontier (1999) and Southern Paternalism and the American Welfare: Economics, Politics, and Institutions in the South, 1865-1965 (1999). He has done much of his work on resource management in Latin America, especially Brazil, but has also studied U.S. economic history and labor policies. He spoke at the Athenaeum on the question “Why Isn’t the Whole World Wealthy?”