This summer, I worked with Professor Kagy on developing an economics seminar on inequality and discrimination.

The project consisted of a few primary tasks: find academic and popular press publications/media sources for the class, create class materials for those sources, and build out the applied econometrics that will be taught alongside the class materials.

Inequality and discrimination, in the US at least, have a long, complicated, and sad history tied to status, subversion, and power. While many are fortunate, far too many, especially people of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, women, immigrants, etc., have lived, worked, and struggled in systems of power rigged against them. For example, we can look back at the early to mid-20th century redlining policies that froze people of color out of the housing market. Since assets and wealth, such as a home, build wealth and intergenerational wealth, the impacts of redlining are still being felt today (see Netflix Explained racial-wealth gap & billionaires).

Moving beyond the history and literature of inequality and discrimination, much of my time was spent working with US Census data to create visualizations of inequality over the last 50 years.

The census data I worked with focused on income, and I was able to visualize numerous examples of inequality. I found it immensely striking how evident the inequality was, even after controlling for exogenous variables. As someone who wants to work in the development/general helping people fields, this project has given me further impetus to pursue this path. In addition, after being abroad, working on this project provided a much-needed refresher on coding and econometrics.

I hope my contribution to this project helps whoever takes this class next spring understand and appreciate the complexities of inequality and discrimination, and perhaps push them to do more to help.