Degrees

Ph.D., Harvard University, 2002
Diploma in Mathematical Statistics, Cambridge University, 1995
B.A., Amherst College, 1994

Biography and Research

I am an economist who brings an abolitionist, anticapitalist, and antiracist approach to economics.  Catalyzed by the Black Radical Tradition, Critical Race Theory, and Marxist challenges to hegemonic neoliberal understandings, this reframing understands power, oppression, and racism as central both to the functioning of the economy and to the ideology and methodology of economics.  My collaborator René Reyes and I call this Abolition Economics (Michigan Journal of Race and Law, 2024).   One goal of an Abolition Economics is to expose the role that economics plays in legitimizing and perpetuating racial capitalism, racial injustice, and interconnected systems of power and oppression.  A second goal is to facilitate the construction of an alternative economics based on a richer and more realistic understanding of power, hierarchy, and racialized economic inequality.  

I received a B.A. in Mathematics and Chemistry in 1994 from Amherst College, a Diploma in Mathematical Statistics from Cambridge University in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard in 2002.  I was conventionally trained as an applied microeconomist inclined towards work on inequality and social policy, and my research focused on public health and social impacts of environmental pollution, gender discrimination, and some topics in law and economics.  So why the abolitionist turn?  What happened??  The simple answer is, for a variety of reasons, I started to see racialized economic reality, racial capitalism, american society, and economics totally differently.  Rather than a neutral system of free markets and an objective social science of rationality, I see an oppressive system of power and a purposeful ideological project.  Nothing has changed, and everything has changed.

First, the economic system: Freedom or oppression? Innovation or exploitation?  We live within racial capitalism, and yet most economists do not think about the world that way.  Racial capitalism – interwoven structures of profit-making and race-making that create accumulation for some via extraction from and exploitation of others – is everywhere and nowhere, hegemonic and invisible.  It is almost nowhere in the public conversation, and within economics it is deracialized as mere capitalism and naturalized as obvious, efficient, meritocratic, and fair.  Within the larger discourse, capitalism is perversely joined with freedom, further hiding its exploitative, racial, racist, and oppressive nature.  Racial capitalism’s power to shape our society, communities, families, and lives derives to a great degree from this invisibility and the remarkably effective ideological work that maintains it.  That’s where economics comes in: the ideological work.

So, to economics: neutral or ideological?  Is economics an objective social science that provides an insightful way of understanding the world?  Or is it a neoliberal ideology that shapes the world and how we understand it?  Consider capitalism again.  Because we all exist within capitalism, it is also true that economics exists within capitalism.  What then does it mean for a field to exist within a societal structure it supposedly studies?  For starters, this means that the field – economics – and the structure – capitalism – are in a complex and intertwined relationship.  Economists can opine on a capitalist economy about as objectively as pharmaceutical scientists can opine on prescription drug prices or politicians can opine on politics.

But wait, one might say, economists don’t offer opinions, they don’t opine – economists are scientists who offer facts.  The problem with this is that economists’ facts are frequently biased, often changing, and sometimes persistently wrong.  Economics offers what the stratification economist William Darity, Jr. calls “an anecdotally grounded” story of the economy, as opposed to an “empirically grounded” one.  Essentially, economics often provides explanations that are counterfactual, as in counter to the facts.  In particular, racial economic facts are explained first by narratives or meritocracy and then the residual attributed to race.  But Cedric Robinson helps us understand race as the essential “rationalization for domination, exploitation, and/or extermination” within capitalism.  And the critical race theorist Cheryl Harris helps us understand meritocracy as an ideological laundering of white privilege.  So neither race nor meritocracy are so much explanations as descriptions of the ideological and practical processes of exploitation.  In Black Marxism, Robinson argues that even Marxism, the most famous and enduring critique of capitalism, is very much rooted in the Western civilization out of which it arose, and hence is tragically insufficient.

Thus, a crucial way economics maintains its power and shapes our world is by not merely declining to acknowledge the conflicts of interest created by capitalism’s hegemony, but by further refusing to acknowledge that capitalism is always and everywhere racist, misogynist, and imperialist.  Not only do we live our lives within it, we do our economics within it too.  This has profound implications.  For starters, economics is infused with these same values.  Beyond that, since economics denies the very context within which it exists, it is implicitly perpetuating them.  Even further, in claiming to be objective it is actively complicit in maintaining and strengthening these systems.

Hence Abolition Economics as resistance.  Racial capitalism’s hegemony requires invisibility, compliance, and complicity – and economics with a capital E is crucial to all three.  Without the economists, these “administrators of state power,” the veneer of objectivity and well-meaning humanity would crack.  The Black Radical Tradition, Critical Race Theory, and pluralist approaches contest the status quo, revealing reality and enabling understanding of what economics, and economists, are actually doing.  This is the liberatory potential of study, thought, movements, conversation, and scholarship: to empower us to understand precisely how racial capitalism is a system of racist unfreedom, and thereby to begin to imagine how we might build a new system in which freedom and thriving are possible.  It is also why an Abolition Economics project is perceived as a threat to this status quo: because it very much is.

Teaching

My teaching is centered around this Abolition Economics work of revealing and reconstituting economics for the purpose of human thriving.  If economics is a neoliberal ideology masquerading as objective social science, one step to a better future is to unmask it.  The portfolio of courses I teach reflects a process of revealing, reconsidering, and reconstituting economics, following the abolitionist ethos of “dismantle, change, and build.”

Economics 211, Antiracist Antieconomics, starts this dismantling, critically examining the basics of economics and engaging students in considering what we do as students and practitioners of “economics,” and then proceeds to tentatively begin the re-building and imagining of new directions.  Economics 205, Pluralist Economics, explores a variety of other directions economists actually do take: alternative methods, values, topics, and pedagogy from Critical Race Theory, Racial Capitalism, Black Marxism, Marxism, Feminist Economics, Stratification Economics, Ecological Economics, and Abolition Economics.  This course serves to expand our ways of thinking, and enables an uncovering of and challenge to the racist and capitalist ideologics central to economic practice and the functioning of the U.S. racial patriarchal capitalist regime.  Economics 416, Economics of Race and Gender (cross-listed with Black Studies and Sexuality, Women’s & Gender Studies), employs this pluralist economics approach together with interdisciplinary perspectives from sociology, psychology, history, political science, and critical race theory to build understanding of the structural hierarchies and functioning of racial patriarchal capitalism.  This course also engages each student in the building and imagining of a new economics through their creative design of a learning experience with the potential to expand the possibilities for the undergraduate economics endeavor.  Lastly, Economics 412, Pluralist Applied Micro Practicum, brings pluralism to applied micro to experiment with how we might do economics in a way that is adventurous rather than imperialist, curious and exploratory rather than settler colonial, and humanistic rather than narrowly scientific.  This is a workshop class in which we engage in independent work in community, bringing pluralism to the structure of our class, the methodologies of our inquiry, and the topics we choose.

Side by side with these, my other economics classes approach more traditional economics topics with this critical, pluralist, abolitionist perspective.  These classes weave the pluralism in organically: Economics 212, Public Economics: Environment Health and Inequality; Economics 214: Health Economics and Policy; and Economics 300: Microeconomics (from an anti-capitalist perspective). And, finally, I endeavor to cross disciplinary boundaries as well, cross-listing some of the above courses in Black Studies and Sexuality and Women’s and Gender Studies, and co-teaching in these other departments.  The History of Racial Capitalism class I co-teach with a colleague in Black Studies and History explores racial capitalism through the lenses of history and economics.  We weave these disciplinary approaches together to build understandings of how racism, slavery, segregation, and imperialism are key to how the economic system of capitalism enables the creation of profit for some via the racialized exploitation of others.

Thus, by creatively seeing, listening, and imagining I believe that together we can build an expansive economics with radical potential.