In 2022, white residents of the Greater Boston area had about 19 times as much wealth as Black residents, $214,000 to $11,000, according to the Urban Institute. While the gap is particularly large in this part of the country, it's an issue across the US. In 2019, Black Americans held just $0.17 on average for every white dollar of wealth. 

Much has been written about the racial wealth gap, but how has it evolved since emancipation? Why has it been so stubbornly persistent over the past 160 years? And what role does this country's original sin of slavery continue to play in its perpetuation? 

The Princeton University Economist Ellora Derenoncourt takes these questions on in "The Wealth of Two Nations," a paper published last year in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Beginning with the Civil War, Derenoncourt and her coauthors chart the way the racial wealth gap narrowed, stalled, and started to widen again in recent years. She writes, "While policies that address racial gaps in savings and capital gains can be a complement, only the redistribution of large stocks of wealth, like reparations, can immediately reduce the racial wealth gap." 

This month on Colloquy: the history of the racial wealth gap.

According to the 2023 Democracy Report of the VDEM Institute based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, the advances and global levels of democracy made over the past 35 years have been wiped out. Seventy-two percent of the world's population now live in autocracies. Freedom of expression is deteriorating in 35 countries. Government censorship of the media is worsening in 47 countries. Government repression of civil society organizations is worsening in 37 countries. And the quality of elections is worsening in 30 countries.

Dame Louise Richardson, PhD ’89, believes that universities have a key role to play in addressing this crisis. Formerly the head of the universities of Oxford and St. Andrews in the United Kingdom, and now president of the Carnegie Corporation, Richardson says institutions of higher learning can forge a path to more sustainable democracy by modeling a fairer and more representative society, generating and sharing deep knowledge, and advocating for democratic systems. (Dame Richardson’s talk was delivered on November 8 at the 2023 Samuel and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center of International Affairs. )

Obesity in the United States has reached epidemic proportions, affecting millions of Americans and costing the healthcare system billions of dollars each year. As is so often the case with disease in this country, communities of color suffer disproportionately.

Public health expert Sara Bleich, PhD ’07, says it’s time to deal with obesity as the urgent crisis that it is. A professor of public health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and former director of nutrition security for the Biden administration, Bleich says the disease is largely preventable but to make progress, the country must deal with persistent inequities in the healthcare system—and the structural racism that underlies them. Join us this time for a conversation about obesity, public health, and race.

This month on Colloquy, we speak with PhD student Grant Jones about Healing Attempt, his collaboration with Grammy Award-winning artist Esperanza Spaulding and Buddhist leader Lama Rod Owens that combines mindfulness and music to improve the wellbeing of people of color.

The US economy is strong. Unemployment is close to a 50-year low, real wages are rising for those at the bottom of the income ladder, and inflation is down though still not entirely in the rearview mirror. You’d never know it from the press coverage, though, which tends to focus on how people feel about the economy, namely that it’s bad and getting worse. 

In this episode of Colloquy, we take a step back from perception to look at where we were, where we are, and how we got here. What did the pandemic shocks teach us about government intervention in the economy? What did they show us about inflation and unemployment? And what have economists learned that can help policymakers cope with the next big crisis?

With us to parse these questions is Karen Dynan, a professor of the practice at the Harvard University Department of Economics and the Harvard Kennedy School. A senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Professor Dynan is the chair of the American Economic Association Committee on Economic Statistics. She previously served as assistant secretary for economic policy and chief economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury from 2014 to 2017. She received her PhD in economics from Harvard Griffin GSAS in 1992. 

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July 2023 was actually the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. The heat wave caused hundreds of deaths, thousands of hospitalizations, and billions of dollars in damages. It also exacerbated droughts, wildfires, and power outages. 

The culprit behind this unprecedented heat is climate change, driven by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The most well-known greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, which comes from burning fossil fuels. Often overlooked is methane, which accounts for about 16 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and has more than doubled since pre-industrial times. 

Robert Stavins, PhD ’88, says that reducing the amount of methane in the atmosphere is a critical and cost-effective way to slow climate change and its impacts. To get there, the AJ Meyer professor of Energy and Economic Development at the Harvard Kennedy School is leading a new initiative at the University’s Salata Institute which aims to reduce methane emissions from different sectors using innovative approaches and collaborations. If successful, he says the world can “bend the curve” on climate change, giving humanity desperately needed time to address the larger, long-term problem of carbon dioxide.

Every technology is accompanied by a cultural technique says the artist and media scholar Emilio Vavarella, a PhD candidate in film and visual studies and critical media practice at the Harvard Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “You have the calculator, but you also have the number," he says. "Everything we do from speaking to being able to write an imaginary story—all of these are specific techniques that we have developed. It’s what makes us human.” Vavarella calls these frameworks media models: abstract models that mirror specific technologies. Media models are the paradigms through which humans try to understand the world and themselves. Their development is slow and not necessarily linear or progressive, but it embraces all sectors of human life. In this episode of the Colloquy podcast, Vavarella gives a short history--from pre-historic hydrology to modern computation--of the ways in which technology and culture have interacted to shape the ways human beings think.

The global average temperature for July 2023 was the highest on record—and maybe the highest for the last 120 years according to the United Nations’ weather agency. In the United States, temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona reached a record 118 degrees Fahrenheit and hit highs of at least 110 degrees for 31 consecutive days—also a record. And yet the populations of Arizona, Texas, and Florida, the states hardest hit by the warming trends, continue to expand. All of those people need air conditioning and refrigeration to make life bearable--but current cooling technologies just make the planet warmer. That's why Jinyoung Seo, PhD '23, wants to reinvent the air conditioner. In this episode of Colloquy, Seo talks about how he uses solid refrigerants to eliminate cooling systems’ direct greenhouse gas emissions—all while making them smaller and vastly more efficient.

In the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, thousands enlisted in the US military, were deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and became embroiled in conflicts that were often fought not on the battlefield but in rural villages and in cities. To prepare for that type of warfare, American troops often trained at bases in the southwestern United States, where the military constructed replicas of Afghan and Iraqi towns. The US military hired people of Arabic descent to portray civilians working in markets, driving their cars--and being insurgents and terrorists.

In this episode of Colloquy, the scholar Adam Longenbach discusses the normalization of military violence in civilian spaces and the role that architecture plays in that process. Longenbach traces the trend back to its beginnings in World War II to show how the built environment, augmented by Hollywood stagecraft, has been used to turn city streets and urban neighborhoods into battle zones. (This talk was originally given during the Harvard Horizons Symposium in 2023.)

Starting July 4, 2021, and lasting past the holiday, members of the LGBTQ community converged on Provincetown, Massachusetts, for a holiday that was supposed to be a celebration of the end of the long COVID-19 lockdown. When the weather turned rainy, they confidently took the party indoors, packing the little seaside town’s restaurants, bars, and clubs. Why not? They were vaccinated and mask mandates had been lifted.

What happened next shocked both the revelers and the country, shutting down what had been hyped as a “hot vax summer,” and signaling that there was a long way to go before the pandemic was over. PhD student Lydia Krasilnikova—who co-led an 80-person, multi-organization collaboration examining the July 2021 superspreader event in Provincetown—talks about what happened and how the outbreak contributed to the US Center for Disease Control’s decision to resume its recommendation of indoor masking later that year.