The Pay Check

On Breakthrough, a new series from the Prognosis podcast, we explore how the pandemic is changing our understanding of healthcare and medicine. We start with an examination of long Covid, a mysterious new illness that has stumped doctors attempting to treat symptoms that last for months and potentially years. It has changed the way hospitals work and forced healthcare officials to prepare for the next pandemic. Covid has also opened the door to revolutionary technology: messenger RNA vaccines. It’s a technology that never could have been proven so quickly outside the crucible of that first pandemic year, 2020, and it holds big implications for the future of medicine. Breakthrough launches on Oct. 19. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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With the season behind us, Rebecca Greenfield and Jackie Simmons sat down during the Bloomberg Businessweek conference to go inside the making of The Pay Check. They talked about how the series came together, high points, challenges and reactions -- and even teased what might be coming from the Pay Check team in the future.

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For our final episode of season 3, we take a look at how reckoning with our history, collectively, and personally, can help us move forward. Closing the racial wealth gap might not be possible anytime soon. But if the U.S. wants to seriously tackle these injustices, it might need to start with the truth. A few years ago, Bloomberg colleague, Claire Suddath explored her own family’s connection to slavery and a plantation in Mississippi. Jackie sits down with Claire to explore what it was like to reckon with that past.

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Reparations for slavery in the U.S. aren't happening any time soon. But there are other countries that have compensated populations for persecution. This week, the Pay Check heads to the U.K., which is in the midst of what it calls a "compensation scheme" to pay back Black residents known as The Windrush Generation. Olivia Konotey-Ahulu and Brentin Mock dig into why it's less of a model and more of a cautionary tale.

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This week on the Pay Check, we look at the long fight for reparations for slavery in the U.S. Economists have calculated that each Black American is owed around $300,000, which would just about close the racial wealth gap. While momentum for reparations has grown, it's not likely to happen any time soon -- at least at the federal level. Meanwhile, cities and the state of California are looking into local reparations. Susan Berfield looks at how one town is repaying its Black residents for discrimination.

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For the last few weeks, we've talked about the origins of the racial wealth gap. This week, we're turning our attention to one of the first major efforts to create more economic opportunity for Black Americans: Affirmative action in education. Kelsey Butler takes us to California, a place that for decades had strong, successful affirmative action measures, until one day, it didn't. She explains what getting rid of the policy meant for Black and white graduates, and why reinstating it isn't enough to close the wealth gap.

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Homeownership has been a main source of intergenerational wealth in the U.S. But it’s one that is out of reach for many Black Americans. Decades after fair housing reforms, the dramatic disparity between Black and White homeownership isn’t getting any better. In this episode, we look at why this gap persists, with many Black homes overtaxed, undervalued and unjustly foreclosed on. 

The focus of our story is one problem that's a “textbook case of institutional racism”: In thousands of U.S. counties, the method for calculating property taxes means Black Americans are experiencing unfairly high taxes. It's the reason why Di Leshea Scott is renting a home she used to own. 

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The Pay Check team has a request for our listeners. Experts estimate closing the racial wealth gap would cost around $13 trillion. That amounts to around $300,000 for every Black American. We want to know: What would you do with that money? Call and leave us a voicemail at 646-324-3490 or record a voice memo on your phone and email it to [email protected]. We may use your voice on the show.

Thanks!

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The top five White landowners in the U.S. own more land than all the Black landowners combined. And over the last century, Black farmers have lost nearly all of the land they once owned. But in the 1990s, tens of thousands of Black farmers sued the Department of Agriculture for discrimination, and won. In this episode, Elizabeth Rembert looks at the role of farmland in the racial wealth gap, and how one farmer's fight with his local USDA loan officer snowballed into the largest class action lawsuit in U.S. history.

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This week, we look at the 400 years of U.S. history that help explain today's racial wealth gap. Bloomberg economics reporter Catarina Saraiva takes co-hosts Jackie Simmons and Rebecca Greenfield from slavery to the modern era to show big economic losses to Black people in addition to moments that led to big wealth gains for White people.

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