William A. Darity Jr. facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Sandy Darity
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Darity speaking at 2025 Samuel Westerfield Award
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| Born | April 19, 1953 Norfolk, Virginia, U.S.
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| Institution | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Duke University |
| Field | Macroeconomics Public economics Economic stratification analysis |
| Awards | Marshall Scholar (1974) |
William A. "Sandy" Darity Jr. (born April 19, 1953) is an American economist and social scientist. He teaches at Duke University. Mr. Darity studies many things, like how money has changed through history and how different groups of people have different amounts of wealth. He is especially known for his work on how race and ethnicity affect money and jobs.
In 2005, his important paper helped start a new field called "stratification economics." This field looks at how society is divided into layers, and how this affects people's economic chances. He has also studied the Atlantic slave trade, and ideas about reparations for African Americans. Many people say he is one of the top experts on how racial differences affect money in the United States.
Today, he is a special professor at Duke University. He also leads the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity there. Before this, he taught at the University of North Carolina. Mr. Darity has been a visiting scholar at important places like the Federal Reserve and the National Humanities Center. He has also led several economic and sociology groups.
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Early Life and School
Sandy Darity was born in Norfolk, Virginia. When he was a child, he lived in different places like Beirut, Lebanon; Alexandria, Egypt; and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He spent most of his teenage years in Amherst, Massachusetts.
His parents were also professors. His father, William A. Darity Sr., helped start the School of Public Health at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His mother, Evangeline Royal Darity, worked at Smith College and Mt. Holyoke College. He has one sister, Janiki, who is a lawyer.
Mr. Darity went to Brown University and graduated with high honors in 1974. He studied economics and political science. After that, he received a special scholarship called the Marshall Scholar. This allowed him to study for a year at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 1978, he earned his highest degree, a doctorate in economics, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His Career in Academia
In 1980, Mr. Darity started working as an economist for the National Urban League. This group helps people in cities. In 1983, he began teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he stayed for a long time. He also visited the Federal Reserve in 1984.
Mr. Darity has been a leader in many groups. He was on the executive committee for the American Economic Association. He also served as president of the Southern Economic Association and the National Economic Association.
He has taught at many other colleges too, such as Grinnell College, the University of Maryland at College Park, and Spelman College. He has also taught or studied in other countries, like Mexico.
Mr. Darity has received many awards for his work. In 2012, he won the Westerfield Award, which is a very high honor from the National Economic Association. He has also received honorary degrees from Bard College and The New School. In 2024, he was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.
Working at UNC
When he joined the University of North Carolina in 1983, Mr. Darity became a special professor of economics and sociology. He taught about money and how people live in groups. He also helped lead the economics department for students and those getting advanced degrees.
In 2001, he became the director of UNC's Institute of African American Research. This institute studies all parts of Black life and how policies affect them.
Working at Duke
Since 2014, Mr. Darity has been a professor at Duke University. He teaches about public policy, African and African American studies, and economics. He also started and leads the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity, which began in 2015. This center works to understand and fix problems of fairness in society.
What He Studies
Mr. Darity's research covers many topics, but a main idea in all his work is looking at economic inequality. This means studying why some people or groups have more money and opportunities than others.
He has looked at:
- Colorism: How skin color can affect how people are treated.
- Job and Marriage Markets: How discrimination affects finding jobs and even partners.
- Caste and Race: How inequality in places like India (caste system) is similar to racial inequality in the United States.
- Group Differences: How different groups of people get along or have problems.
- Unemployment: How not having a job affects people's feelings and minds.
- Schooling: Why there are differences in school success between different racial groups.
He also studies how money problems in developing countries happen. He looks at how the Trans-Atlantic slave trade might have affected the Industrial Revolution. He even explores how social science research on race connects with African American stories and movies.
Important Research
Mr. Darity has done many important studies. Here are a few examples:
Helping People Find Jobs
With another economist, Samuel Myers Jr., Mr. Darity studied how to measure discrimination in the job market. He also wrote a paper with Patrick Mason in 1998. In this paper, they looked closely at the main ideas about discrimination in economics.
He also worked with Arthur Goldsmith to study how not having a job affects people emotionally. With Major Coleman and Rhonda Sharpe, he found that white workers often think they face more discrimination than they do. Black workers, however, often think they face less discrimination than they actually do.
The "Baby Bonds" Idea
Mr. Darity and economist Darrick Hamilton came up with an idea to help close the wealth gap between different races. They call it "baby bonds." This plan would create a special savings account for every child born. The amount of money in the account would depend on how much wealth the child's family already has. Children could use this money when they become young adults.
A Job for Everyone
Mr. Darity has long supported the idea of a "federal job guarantee." This means the government would make sure that every U.S. citizen over 18 who wants to work can have a job. In 2012, after a big economic crisis, he suggested creating a "National Investment Employment Corps." This program would give people jobs with good pay (above the poverty line) and benefits like health insurance and retirement savings.
Why Reparations Matter
In 1989, Mr. Darity became convinced that a program of reparations was needed for African Americans. He believes this is an important step for the country to take. For over 30 years, he has researched and spoken out about reparations for Black Americans.
In 2003, he wrote a paper called "The Economics of Reparations." In 2020, he and A. Kirsten Mullen published a book called From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century. This book brought together all his ideas on the topic.
Mr. Darity is a leading voice in the discussion about reparations today. He argues that:
- Only Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the U.S. should receive them.
- The money should be enough to make the average wealth of Black and white families equal.
- The U.S. federal government should run the program.
- Most of the money should be given directly to the people who qualify.
Books and Publications
Mr. Darity has written or edited many books and papers. Here are some of them:
- Labor Economics: Problems in Analyzing Labor Markets (1992, editor)
- Macroeconomics (1994, co-author)
- Persistent Disparity: Race and Economic inequality in the United States since 1945 (1999, co-author)
- Boundaries of Clan and Color: Transnational Comparisons of Inter-Group Disparity (2003, co-editor)
- Economics, Economists, and Expectations: Microfoundations to Macroapplications (2004, co-author)
- International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2007, editor-in-chief)
- International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences Volume 2: Cohabitation Ethics in Experimentation (2007, editor-in-chief)
- For-Profit Universities: The Shifting Landscape of Marketized Higher Education (2017, editor)
- From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twentieth Century (2020, co-author)
- The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice (2023, co-editor)
