So today, as you mentioned, we're going to be talking about how to build a pet detector in a notebooks environment. So just to give you a bit of a context, we're going to start off by doing a high-level overview of the deep learning mechanisms we'll be using and the machine learning workflow. And then we'll dive deep into the spend most of the time in the demo notebook and talk about the actual code. So just to give you a bit of context, I'm Catherine Kampf. I work for Microsoft. I'm a program manager on a product called Azure Notebooks, which is our free Azure hosted Jupyter Notebook service. So we'll be seeing it shortly. And here's some of my contact information. I'll be showing it later, so don't worry too much about taking photos or anything just yet. The most important thing to know about me is I really love dogs.  If we look at Alaska Malmoots, Siberian Huskies, they can look super similar. And especially when you're then trying to train a machine to understand this, it can get difficult and you need a ton of data to get an algorithm that can successfully distinguish between these different breeds. So the way we're going to approach this today is using a technique called deep learning. So this is often how deep learning is viewed where you have an input. So that's the dog photograph and the sort of black box where we don't really know exactly what's happening. But then we get these outputs of either a dog or cat or other. Or in this demo, we're actually going to go a bit farther to say if it's a dog or a cat, which breed do we think it is. And so this differs a bit from traditional machine learning where you'd often be doing manual feature extraction. So this requires a bit more hands-on work to say try to discern which features of the data are most important, whether it's size or color, et cetera. And it also requires domain expertise. So this is easier to think about in the pet classification topic space. But if you try to apply this same thinking to a really specialized field, it can get a bit more difficult to do this manual feature extraction. And then you'll also need to run through different classification algorithms to try to distinguish which will work best and get you the highest accuracy. And this differs again from deep learning where we're going to be doing a layered approach trying to understand different features pixel by pixel of our images. And it's going to be the machine doing the heavy lifting of that work rather than manual data science work tuning the features. So like I said, deep learning will require a ton of data. But once you have that data, it becomes a lot easier for the machine to try to understand the data set and generate predictions. Specifically within deep learning, today we're going to be using what's called a convolutional neural network. So this is a really popular network to use specifically for image classification. And that's because this works by preserving the RGB channels in the first layer. So this will take each pixel value, what value they are of red, green, blue, and preserve that in the first layer. And then we'll use a technique, and this is at a very high level, but we'll use a technique to filter on the images themselves and try to extract which information is most important in the convolution layer. And then next we'll move into pooling where we'll try to aggregate that data and reduce the amount of information because of course deep learning is super computationally expensive. So if you can have a bit less of information going into the fully connected layer, it can save you a lot in time and compute power. And then in the end we'll get our prediction for whether or not the animal is a dog, cat, or something else if the network is a bit confused. So if we take a step back and look at the general machine learning workflow that we're going to be walking through today, you're often going to want to start off with data exploration and the data itself in a machine learning workflow. This is going to be where all of the power for your deep learning network comes from and it's going to be the most important part of the process. So this will involve finding a data set, possibly transforming the data set into a particular format you need, cleaning any data, and running some visualizations, trying to understand the basic attributes of the data. And once you have a sense of that you can move into training. And with training this is where we'll actually be developing our algorithm. So there's three main concepts that we like to think about with the training script, compute, and tuning. So to start off with our training script, this is where we'll try out different algorithmic approaches. And of course, your local box can be pretty powerful, but compute-wise, depending on the size of your data, you might need to scale out to a larger VM in the cloud or on-prem or a cluster computing environment. And once you have that algorithm you might be fully satisfied with the accuracy you're seeing or you might want to do some tuning to try to refine that algorithm to see a bit higher accuracies. And once you're happy with your model, then you'll move into the inferencing stage. And this is where you're actually using your model in an application. So this involves three different components where you'll have productization. So this can often mean refactoring your code. So you might have started in a Jupyter notebook environment, but you need to output a Python module. So you'll have to do some work there to refactor it, and we'll talk a bit about that later. And then deploying your model to a web service so you can use it in your applications or other folks across your company or organization can as well.  So that's the high-level overview of what we're going to be walking through today. We'll spend most of our time in these first two stages just for the sake of time, but I'll point you to a get-over repository at the end of this through the entire life cycle. So we're going to start off talking about the data we're using. So today we're using the Oxford Pet dataset. So this is a pretty common dataset which contains 37 categories of different pet breeds. So this is cats and dogs and around 200 images per each breed. And here's a link to it. I definitely encourage you to, especially if you're getting started with machine learning or image recognition, this is a really great and well-labeled and well-documented dataset to use. And then once we get into wanting to explore and understand our data, there's a bunch of different great tools you can use depending on what types of data you're working with or the scale of your data. And today we're going to be using notebooks. So if you're not familiar with Jupyter notebooks, they essentially let you combine markdown text, images, visualizations, et cetera, alongside executable code. So it's super useful in data exploration and data science in general to tell a story around how you got to a specific graph or how you got to a specific model so you have the context either to present to others or look back on your own work and understand each step you went through and get strong visualizations of your data. Specifically today we're going to be using what I mentioned earlier, Azure notebooks, mainly for the free setup and scale out. So my local box is fairly powerful but for something like this I'd rather use a really big, beefy GPU machine in Azure. So Azure notebooks lets you connect from their free compute to a remote VM in Azure. So super useful for scale out scenarios and so I can make it public for all of you to go and play with on your own as well. So I'm going to switch over to the demo to show you exactly what this looks like. So this is the GitHub repository. I'm going to link... Oh, this isn't showing up. Did the IT people go? All right, let's see if we can fix this. Ah, okay, we're good. All right, so this is the GitHub repository I'll link you to just to give you an overview. If you scroll down here you'll see these little launch badge. If you click this it'll automatically clone it into your Azure notebooks account as a new project. So super easy to get started. I've already cloned in which I've already done. You'll get an overview of all the project files here. And this is the compute picker I mentioned. So there's free compute offered as well as... This is my camp VM that I'm connected to. So it's a NC6 GPU machine in Azure. If we move into our notebook I'll just start off and run all of these. So let's first try to understand what the data structure we're working with is. So we know that we're using the Oxford Pets dataset but I'm just going to do a quick ls to see the folder structure we're working with. So it looks like we have 37 folders and presumably those contain the 200 images that we're going to be analyzing today. And just to get a quick visual sense of these I created a little plotting function so we can see exactly the breeds we're going to be working with. And holler in the back if this font's not big enough to make it big. And I think it's very useful to always get this visual sense of your data. For instance here we can see all these 37 breeds and it'd be easy to, once we have our model deployed, submit a breed that's not covered by this dataset and then we confuse if we submitted a golden retriever which isn't reflected in this data and saw relatively low accuracy. It's because it's not reflected in this original dataset. So as I mentioned we're working with 200 images per breed which may seem like a lot but for something like deep learning it's really not enough. That's relatively pretty small data and we'd likely end up with an overfitted model that wouldn't scale out to the data we'd see in the wild. So instead of just training on that we're going to be using a technique called transfer learning. So with transfer learning we're going to take a pre-trained model, so this is the mobile net model that we're using today which has been trained on thousands of general images and then what we'll do is retrain that last layer specifically to our 37 pet breeds. So it'll use all the power of someone who trained this massive, massive network but specify it down to our dataset. So when I run this training job we can see here it takes a bit and has a ton of output. So we can see it took around 26 seconds and we saw an accuracy of almost 80%. So this is from doing that initial transfer learning not tuning any of our hyperparameters which we'll get into later just using a flat learning rate we are still able to get to 80% in 26 seconds which is pretty impressive. If you look back this dataset was first released in 2012 so seven years ago and even with a lot more compute power a lot more time data scientists were still only able to get to around 59% accuracy so it's pretty impressive how far we've been able to come in just a short amount of time. So 79, 80% is pretty great but I want to see if we can improve this all so now we're going to be working with what are called hyperparameters and these are attributes of your network you can determine beforehand so specifically we'll be looking at what's called learning rate and the learning rate is essentially how much you'll let the weight vary on a node from iteration to iteration so how quickly you're letting the network learn and oftentimes in data science you find yourself trying out a bunch of these values and just for looping through randomly because it's often difficult to determine which value might be the best for your specific network so instead of doing that by hand and taking hours to do it we're going to use something called Azure Machine Learning Service which lets you distribute this work across a cluster so I have a four node cluster in my Azure subscription and basically I'm going to send the training script to each of the worker nodes and it'll try out a bunch of so if we see here it'll try out a bunch of uniform random values for the learning rate and it'll tell me which gets the best accuracy so then I can treat that as my best model without having to do as much work and we're going to do a couple of things to make this more efficient so I need to update my calls but we're going to use this early termination policy and basically this lets us if you see this 0.15 what's that saying is if we're seeing a run and the accuracy is less than or more than 15% away from what our current best accuracy we've seen is then we'll just cut that run short and free up that compute resource to be used with a new value so as this runs we can see a bunch of output it's not loaded yet but sometimes it takes a bit depending on wifi but we can see all these jobs running so and a bit of information about our cluster so we have four nodes running and it'll run through a different job tell us how long it took what its run ID is so I'll come back up in a bit so we can see the visualizations it'll start giving you but even though it's pretty efficient to distribute it across a cluster it'll still take around 25 minutes so this is a 30 minute talk I don't really have time for that so here you can see some of the validation accuracy starting to come in as well as different learning rates but I'll just skip ahead to a run we've already done in the past so this was a run I did yesterday and I feed it the specific run ID and now I can see a bit of the information see another graph of the validation accuracy as it went through training and see that the final accuracy was around 93% so with just an additional 25 minutes of training it'll increase our accuracy by 13% which is pretty exciting and 93% is a really great accuracy especially for something like an image recognition task so now that I have that treated as my best run I'm going to register it with the Azure Machine Learning Service and this will basically let me use this model from anywhere or deploy it easily so if I wanted to access this model from BS Code etc. or in a future notebook it's registered and available to me as well as anyone who's working inside my workspace so I know we just covered a bit so I'm going to flip back to the slides to review some of the topics so again we just went through training and we were looking specifically at trying to do deep learning with small data and by nature deep learning is going to require huge amounts of training data because it's doing that feature extraction and trying to figure out the best network structure on its own and so you need as much data as possible to learn from for that so 200 images isn't going to be enough which is why we decided to use transfer learning and specifically transfer learning with the mobile net where we'll be taking the existing mobile net model and retraining the last layers specifically to our 37 pets and then since that was pretty good accuracy around 80% we decided to see if we could do any better by doing some hyper parameter tuning using azure machine learning service so just to call out a couple more exciting things if you're just getting started with machine learning AML can be super useful it's got experiences where you can just do a drag and drop automated machine learning and it tries out a bunch of different classification algorithms for you or use it for hyper parameter tuning like we just saw an automated compute scale up scale down so I have a four node cluster in my subscription right now but I've set the min nodes to zero so whenever I'm not using it and not running my jobs it'll scale down and won't cost me money which is super great so once we have this model like I mentioned you might want to do some refactoring so I'm going to move into VS code for that and this is the same demo notebook that we just had the IPYMB file but when I open it in VS code the JSON dump of what a raw notebook file looks like and I also see this option to import it so I'm going to go ahead and click that and VS code will turn this into a .py file with a bunch of cells so here I can see the mark down has been turned into comments my Python code is still here and I can visually see that I have these little cells with this run cell option that'll bring up an interactive window and run a cell as you would see in Jupyter side by side and this essentially works as a Python console so you can type code in here etc so when you're into refactoring this can be super useful if we just highlight a snippet of code we'll have all the refactoring capabilities you're used to with an editor so you can see we can change all occurrences extract method etc all from what started as a Jupyter notebook so you can now refactor that into whatever form fits your workload best and I have an example in the GitHub repository of what a refactored Python module might look like and once we've refactored it to what we're happy with and deployed our model we'll want to go ahead and test it so this is a testing script I've written so we'll do the same action and run this cell to see what it looks like and what we'll be doing here you can either we have some code to access a random pet to try it out or in this example I'm specifically trying with this little toawa I found on the internet and we can see here it loads the toawa image as we would expect and something new that we just introduced is actually the ability to debug cell by cell so we just ran this first cell successfully and now I'm going to hit this debug cell and we can see at this point here so once I hit debug cell it'll open the different tools I'm used to in my debugger I can step through etc or just continue on and once I continue on I can see that it gets it right toawa with a pretty accurate probability so this is super useful to be able to do this debugging bit by bit and we just introduced it this week and we're going to learn more about it come by our booth and we can talk more but this is going to be super powerful when you're working in a data science space and trying to debug cell by cell and so now that we know our pet detector is working pretty well and we have a great probability we're good to go so just to rehash a bit about working with python in visual studio code we just saw that we have debugging and refactoring capabilities there's also IntelliSense so auto completion as well as the ability to import export Jupyter Notebook so as you saw we were importing that Jupyter Notebook it transformed it into a .py file with different cells and you can continue to work and refactor that into a python module or you can re-export it back as a Jupyter Notebook if so you want to present the information etc there's a variable explorer data viewer a bunch of full-fledged data science tools and if there's anything you don't see that you would love to see please come talk to us we are heavily investing in making this a great experience so now that we've covered most of that workflow what's next so here's a link to the GitHub repository where you can build your own pet detector as well as links to try out Azure Notebooks and the data science tooling as well as the visual studio code and then I have some resources on the next slide as well but I'll let people take photos of this as they wish and I think we have a few minutes we'll have a few minutes left for questions and then I'll hang around outside in the hallway as well or I'll just be outside and at the booth thank you for the talk I have a question usually in this kind of example so we talk about classification to the small amount of categories like brews of dogs what what shall we do if what can I train something to classify let's say several thousand categories or maybe one hundred thousand let's say I just want to create some classifier that tells me what is on the picture so how can I accomplish this task so shall I try a lot of classifiers for each separate category or maybe there are some approaches to do it just out of box yeah so it depends sort of on this how big the size of each category you have so if you have hundreds of thousands of categories and five images per each category then you'll have to try to use some pre-existing models but if you're able to do if you have a hundred thousand categories and you have a hundred thousand images within those then you can employ a lot of different techniques whether you just want to do traditional deep learning on your full data set or try out bit by bit depending on the topics you're working with in the image you could try different classification algorithms on each set as you mentioned okay and another question is there some you know software as a service in Azure that provides classifier as service just for me not to write it by my own but just call some API and yeah so we have something that's called Azure Cognitive Services which basically are suite of exactly that APIs for speech to text, search image recognition etc so if you search just Azure Cognitive Services that's exactly what it does hopefully that helps in the demo you are using an image folder locally is that correctly understood in the GitHub repository you have images there and they are then uploaded to your model the images are not coming from somewhere else yeah so these images I actually put into Azure storage they are in the GitHub repository as well so the notebook refers to the Azure storage so you need to upload it to the Azure storage and then so I loaded them on to the specific VM I was working with but you could there's a limited amount of free storage in Azure notebooks as well you can upload a subset of the data and work with it there or upload the full data set to Azure and you could also use you also have a service for uploading the images right on Azure if I remember correctly yeah there's a couple services you can either do it from the Azure portal or use the Azure Data Explorer which will let you upload data to a variety of stores depending on what your end store is in Azure if it's blob or Azure Data Lake it's the possibility of marking up where in the image the object is that you are so this data set is nice because it actually it gives you the full image and then it also has a highlight around a box highlight around the face of the pet which makes it a good sample data set for cases like this but do you mean in general or specific for this data set for specific yeah yeah does that help that yeah no that's good it'll like box the face for you to make it a bit easier so if you're looking at a full dog or just a dog space I just didn't see it in the GitHub repository but it's somewhere yeah if you the link I provided to the like Oxford pet data set earlier in the slides if you read there it'll have the boxed images thank you yeah this one or the one okay and I'll tweet the link to the slides as well so if there are no more questions is there a question left if there are no more questions let's thank the speaker again


Good afternoon Andoni. We'll start with the breaking news and the upsetting news really with regards to junior triore who has Unfortunately had malaria. He's been in hospital and been rather unwell. Could you just give us an update on his situation and how is he? Yeah, it was right now. He's recovering. He's much better than it was past weeks. It has been a really tough situation for him personally because of the timing and because it's a disease that gets you very weak, you know and now He's out from the hospital. He's here with us, but From the sport side he will be he has to be out for for some time Yeah, obviously a big blow for the club and for the player His health is paramount and I'm led to believe there'll be more tests And he'll be monitored and looked after for the coming weeks and months by the club. Yes, for sure for sure They have to check that everything works well all day or his body is working properly But for sure he will be out for for some months. I cannot be more concrete but obviously he will not be part of the African Nations Cup and he will not be able to play for us for some time Well our thoughts obviously go to to him at this difficult time I would say did you have a good Christmas, but six wins in seven matches? I'm beaten in that time I think I know the answer. Is this the best period you've ever had as a manager in football the best run? Yeah, I would save him as a player. I don't remember. I don't remember. It's very difficult to win games in a row I think we've won four in a row away. This is really difficult even if you are Playing for important teams. It's not so easy But we also were coming from a very bad run, you know And we are now in a good position But we still want to keep adding more points adding more wins now We know we have a tough schedule starting from Sunday's game against the Spurs away especially after the loss yesterday in Brighton for sure they will be Willing to bounce back and play very good against us, but we have to prepare for this game I guess as well with the current run and the the feel-good factor around the group that you've created There's a no fear attitude at the moment You don't mind playing any team you look forward to every game because there's a belief that you can beat anyone Yeah, we know right now that if we give our best level we can be competitive We have to show that we can beat these top teams We know that we are going to suffer there for sure It doesn't matter if we play well or not because they It's a team that puts pressure on you We will be without the ball a lot of time So we have to be ready for this and then we have to trust also our our especially our offensive Power and we know that our forwards right now. They are in a good moment And if if if we are defending well, we are playing well, we'll have our chances for sure Yes up next in the Premier League Tottenham Hotspur away Could you just give us an update on the the team news? We know obviously that junior won't be involved for some time Are there any players that you're welcoming back or any concerns you have? I? Think right now. We are not changing a lot because at the end the the marketing days are just three four days The only player we could recover Maybe I don't know. It's a loose cook the rest. I think they are not close to to being with the with the group so it could be the only The only change but it's not guaranteed. We have to see if tomorrow we can train with us and help us Tottenham have been one of the exciting teams to watch in the Premier League this season much like yourself Ange Posterkoglu has gone into the club Created a new philosophy a new style of play the players seem to be really enjoying it They're exciting to watch. I know they played last night. What have you made to them this season? Did you watch the game last night? Yes, of course. We watch the game. I think they are a really good team. They have very very good players. They play very attractive football and I think they are Getting also their results. No, it's if we want to to compete against them We have to give our 100% because They are very physical. They run a lot. They talk very well the spaces. They can play in tight spaces They are comfortable even under pressure. I remember the game we played against them I think he's quite happy with the game. We were good this game, but they won us to kneel quite easy I would say you know so we We know that we have to give our 100% if we want to have any chance and just final points for me and There's so much talk about Dominic Selanke 13 goals in all competitions this season. He's having the best season in his career How how much do you take pride in what he's doing what he's doing off the ball the goals? He's scoring and how difficult will it be to resist any potential offers in January because there will be a lot of Big clubs that will look at his goals ratio and the way he's playing and go He's the striker for us. I Don't feel dumb has changed so much from the beginning of the season It's not like he was not playing well and now no, I think The collective improvement probably makes him look a little bit better, but he was very good since day one I think he has caught the first day of the season and has been really good from from the beginning of the season You asked me from the market. Obviously. I don't want to lose Dom Selanke. This is It's very easy for me to say but every time the the the market opens Coaches, we don't know what it's going to happen. So we cannot Have nothing for for guaranteed Hopefully you won't lose any players, but of course you can sign players from Monday Have you got plans in place to bring people in at the start of the window or are you just going to monitor and let things develop? No, I don't think in in in the winter market. We're gonna see a lot of changes Normally, it's not a market where you can sign a lot of players. I suppose and I think some of the players that are not having the minis they want they will ask for for For loans or for for the parties to other places and we will have to replace if they are the parties will have to replace With other or other players, but I don't expect As much movement that normally happens in the in the summer Tony good to you again and Touched on your current form when you're playing like you are when everyone else is wanting time off at this time Are you just want the games to continue to come thick and fast? Yeah, I think we are in a good moment also physically, you know even After this busy schedule and we are not changing so So much but players are recovering really well physically. I see that we finish the games in a good condition. So we It's good for us that we continue playing and we have Tottenham game and then the FA Cup game before the small break So I hope we can continue our form and be competitive in these two last games Things looking very settled for you right now and that's reflected in your your excellent runner form Touch on the increased squad depth and competition though within your squad Is it making it more difficult for you for those personnel calls those selection calls that you're gonna have to make moving forward? Yeah, for me, it's difficult to make the start in 11. It's not like we are winning. Okay. They continue the same sometimes We are changing normally one two players because everyone is coming also from the bench. They are doing well They are putting pressure on the on the ones that are starting and it's not being easy for me to make the The decisions and it's good for the team. This internal competition is very good for the team and If we recover more more injured players, it's gonna be even tougher and I think it's the way to to build No, the the team. Yeah, Alex Scott recently spoke about the confidence that you've given him The confidence since your arrival at Bournemouth you've given the entire squad How important for you is that in management? Is it one of the most? Key things that you can look at the way that you look to transform a squad and and try and build a squad. I Think it has it's I give them confidence because they are good players. You know if they weren't good players I wouldn't Like to them. No, I think we have good players and We have to find a way To to make them even look better. No, and something starts from something collective It's normally doesn't happen. No, this team is playing very bad, but The number nine is very good. Amazing. It's calling a lot of course. No, but it doesn't happen I think it's something that we have to do some sacrifices collectively. We have to make our our our Rans our press our defensive stuff So it will look better than on the ball and everyone is is with more confidence. I think antipostacol glue We spoke about as a rival at Tottenham and the impact he's having there The boldness is probably a word a lot of people are using when talking about Tottenham and the wrist that they take when they play I think that showed in their defeat at Brighton last night a source of debate for Spurs fans the risk that a Sider willing to take Can you set up to try and deal with that? Do you does that add to the challenge that you face on Sunday knowing that they will they will push it for me? They they do a very difficult thing very very difficult and It's very special for them because it's true that as you say they take the risk they build up they Play very open But they don't concede a lot of goals you they don't concede a lot of goals in transition It's not like you say no they play very open as soon as they lose the balls They are considering no no they are not considering so many goals. They are not making so many mistakes with With the result of of a goal against no no they are defending really well difficult situation and it this is Probably because they are very well coached and also because they are very good Defenders individually, you know, they are keepers playing very well the defenders they are Defending very well in difficult situations and it's something that We all the teams want, you know, we want to build up from the back And then when you lose it don't concede but Tottenham I think is the you know the best or one of the best teams doing these things. There's high lines though And there's the antipostacol blue high line. Have you got plans to exploit that on Sunday? You always try to exploit the things that the opposition gives you. I don't think Tottenham gives you a lot At the there are some teams that will go more aggressive like Tottenham like we know more the others Will defend more the spaces is going to be different challenges But I think they do it very really well Villa does the same and it's difficult to get chances against them and Tottenham the same way All the players are I think in the In the same line of thinking and they don't make mistakes They have scored in every league game so far this season as well Tottenham underlining despite Their squad looking injury depleted how much threat that they they have ahead of this weekend again. Yeah Defensive side is very good. They have top-level players. We could see the game. We played here We have to be ready to Face difficult duels at the back We have to be ready to help each other because sometimes we are gonna lose the duels for sure because Against Brennan Johnson against so and against the Charleston against you're going to lose duals. It's a matter of off time We will try not to lose as much as many and then to help when when that happens to help because They are always an offensive threat. Yes Finally from me playing New Year's Eve Be nice get a win for the Bournemouth fans then home for something to drink before midnight Is that the plan for yourself? It will be very nice. It will be very nice, but we know it's gonna be very difficult. We have to be at our best and Right now we are in a good moment with confidence But probably we have to even improve our level if we want to to compete there is Can I just ask one quick one? There's been a little bit speculation about David Brooks and interest from both Leeds and Southampton I know game time has been hard to come by for David so far in this season Would you like to keep him or perhaps would him going to play matches be the best thing for for his career as much as Bournemouth? No, it's not about One individual situation. No, it's a matter of what sometimes what they think no David the other day came he played very good minutes and his things that Not him or not all the players not that play probably they are not getting the rest the minutes They want they have to discuss with the with the club and take the the best possible option for everyone, you know, sometimes it will be one one They will leave because all things is the best thing sometimes they will stay and but Right now before the market opens We I cannot and I will not speak about the video situation


Well, thank you so much for that generous introduction. I am thrilled to be back in Amherst, Massachusetts, a town that I grew up in. And as a couple of people have noted, I actually went to Amherst Regional High School years and years ago, so a lot of years ago, yeah. When I have the opportunity to give lectures of this type, I frequently want to issue a provocation. And that's no different this evening. I hope I will have issued a provocation by the time this talk is completed. But I'd like to begin with a story about India and Mohandaske Gandhi. In the 1930s, Gandhi was engaged in a crusade against the practice of untouchability. Now I want to be clear about this. Gandhi's crusade was not against casteism itself. A caste Hindu, Gandhi sought a reform of the caste system, not its abolition. Abolition was, of course, the objective of B. R. Ambedkar, the great Dalit leader. In fact, Ambedkar forcefully referred to his goal as annihilation of caste. So one could imagine a situation in the United States where slavery remains a legal practice and we could have a debate between those folks who wanted to reform slavery and those who wanted to abolish it. And I would argue that the Gandhi versus Ambedkar position is precisely that, a juxtaposition of a desire for reform versus a desire for abolition. However, the severity of the practice of untouchability was sufficient for Gandhi's attack on untouchability to be of great political significance. Now on January 15th, 1934, a violent earthquake struck Bihar. It was 8.4 on the Richter scale. It flattened the districts of Mazafapur and Munger. Thirty thousand people were killed and in Amarchya's son's words, it ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of others. Now in his memoir, Home in the World, Sin reports that Gandhi joined in the relief effort. But Gandhi also did something else. He decided to make a statement that identified the earthquake as a punishment given to the Indian people for the sin of untouchability. For Gandhi, the earthquake was divine retribution for India's evil practice. Sin, I believe, was only two years of age at the time, but he later became aware that other anti-untouchability activists like the great novelist and scholar Rabindranath Tagore were outraged by Gandhi's statement for three reasons. First, Gandhi had advanced an a scientific explanation for the causes of earthquakes. He had offered a divine explanation for the source of the earthquake. Second, the anti-untouchability activists who objected to Gandhi's position thought that there was no distinction being made between what we might perceive as guilt and punishment, that these were disconnected, that thousands of the individuals who had been killed or harmed by the earthquake bore no responsibility for the sin of untouchability, and in fact many individuals who were treated as untouchables died during the course of the earthquake. And third, and this is most important from the standpoint of our conversation this evening, they took the position that it was not legitimate, not legitimate to make a tactical use of scientific nonsense in helping a great cause, okay? Let me repeat that, it was not legitimate to make a tactical use of scientific nonsense in helping a great cause. And this third point is critical from the standpoint of the presentation that I'd like to make this evening because I think it embraces a general principle that is going to apply to the argument that I attempt to make this evening. And that principle is do not use a false or weak argument to support a great cause. This is effectively a propagandistic strategy, and I think it's important that this propagandistic strategy be challenged. And I'll explain in a moment what the argument is that is associated with this notion of a propagandistic strategy in the current moment. And that argument is the premise that if we get rid of racism, everyone will benefit. If we rid ourselves of the sin of structural racism, everyone will gain. More specifically, and this is an offshoot of the same argument, if we were to adopt a program of black reparations, it would be beneficial to all Americans. From this perspective, structural racism functions as a deadweight loss to the economy. And it would suggest that there's a certain degree of irrationality on the part of white Americans in maintaining an attachment to white supremacy. Stratification economics rejects the irrationality premise. And I would like to argue that, of course, there's a major element in contemporary economics that pushes the field away from its long-standing attachment to the rationality principle. And that is the field of behavioral economics. There are three examples that I would like to highlight from behavioral economics that make the point or attempt to make the point that human beings can behave in wholly irrational ways. So one example is the observation that people will buy things that they never actually use. I would argue that the presumption that that's irrational is contingent on assuming that people's tastes are fixed, which they are not. There can be variations in your taste over the course of a lifetime. And the point where you make the purchase, you may anticipate that you're going to use it, but subsequently your tastes change and you don't use it. But the other thing is we are social creatures. And so as a consequence, we engage with others. And sometimes the objects that we purchase are merely there for the purpose of display as a source of maintaining status. And status is a use. So let's, and we're going to come back to the importance of these social interactions in shaping people's beliefs as a counter to the claim that people behave irrationally. The second example that's frequently used is people following the herd in investment decisions. And by following the herd, they can be led to the trough or they can be led astray. I'm going to argue, though, that the reason why people frequently follow the herd is because of the condition of uncertainty that shapes the process of investment decisions and their concern about their reputations. Again, social interaction. Let me read a lengthy passage from chapter 12 of Keynes's general theory, which I think is relevant to this argument. Keynes said the following. Investment based on genuine long term expectation is so difficult today as to be scarcely practical. He who attempts it must surely lead much more laborious days and run greater risks than he who tries to guess better than the crowd, how the crowd will behave. And given equal intelligence, he may make more disastrous mistakes. There is no clear evidence that the investment policy which is socially advantageous coincides with that which is most profitable. It needs more intelligence to defeat the forces of time or our ignorance of the future than to beat the gun. Life is too short. He goes on to say, The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and over exacting to anyone who is entirely exempt of the gambling instinct. Whilst he who has it must pay to the propensity the appropriate toll. Furthermore, an investor who proposes to ignore near term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money. A further reason for the higher return from the pastime to a given stock of intelligence and resources. Finally, it is the long term investor, he who best promotes the public interest, who will in practice come in for the most criticism. Wherever investment funds are managed by committees or boards or banks.  If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness. And if in the short run, he is unsuccessful, which is very, very likely he will not receive much money. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. So you follow the herd because that's the conventional behavior and you are concerned about your reputation. Then third, a third argument that's frequently made in the behavioral economics crowd is the point about sunk cost. And individuals should not allow sunk cost. That is, if you purchase something and you spent on something like going to the theater and you don't manage to get to the show, well, it's a sunk cost so you shouldn't worry about it. It shouldn't affect your future decisions. Again, I would argue that this is really contingent upon whether or not our decisions are made in isolation or made in a social context. In a social context, we would not want to adversely affect our reputation by giving people the impression that we make purchases willy-nilly, that we don't follow through on, and that we might not be reliable for any kinds of loans or purchases that we might take or get or give them. So once we're in a social context where image, reputation, and status make a difference, then it alters the way in which we think about the calculus of rationality. So how does stratification economics fit into this? Well, stratification economics posits that individuals have not only an attachment to their relative position in comparison with others who they might identify as their peers, but they also have a concern about the relative position of the social identity group that they view as the one that they belong to. So stratification economics then puts us in a position where we put at the forefront questions concerning image, status, and reputation, but we link image, status, and reputation to material position as well. So let me turn next to this whole question of how we think about who wins or loses from racism. So given a social group identity where an individual is attached to the particular group that is in a dominant position in the society, they are probably going to be concerned about maintaining that position of dominance. They may be concerned about maintaining that position of dominance in a highly, highly conscious way, or it may be something that is an undercurrent that is shaping their decisions and their beliefs and attitudes. I want to emphasize that I want to distinguish between irrationality and misperception. These are not the same things. You can make wholly rational decisions, decisions that are predicated upon what you value with incorrect information. And, excuse me, I'm going to argue as we proceed that there are many instances in which incorrect information plays a role in the decisions that people make, but there's a paradox that I'm going to come to. So we frequently hear the point made that the white working class votes against its own self-interest due to its attitudes about race. That frequently the white working class votes against social policies that would be beneficial to them because they do not want to see any benefits going to black Americans or other social groups that they see as outside of their orbit. Well, if your position of self-interest includes an attachment to relative group position, then intrinsically, if you are an advocate of maintaining white advantage, then if that's part of your utility function, then by definition, you are acting in your self-interest if you're trying to preserve your relative position. So if you think that the policy that will be adopted would alter relative position to the disadvantage of your group, even if you are better off in an absolute sense, then self-interest is transparently being pursued. But that's not the argument that people usually try to make. They generally want to accept the idea that there may actually be a decline in the relative position for whites in a context in which whites might actually gain an absolute advantage. It's just that their absolute advantage will not be as large as the absolute advantage associated with the other group's gain or benefit, or here's the other argument, whites will actually reduce their absolute position for the purpose of maintaining their racial edge. And in this context, there's an argument that Heather McKee has made, which I refer to now as the swimming pool argument, where she talks about a southern community that rather than desegregating its pools, shuts the pools down for everybody. This would be similar to what occurred in Virginia and Farmville, Virginia, where under pressure to desegregate the schools, the Farmville School Board, the white school board in the early 1960s, chose to close the school system down altogether. So I'm going to argue first that these are symbolic acts that preserve a system of advantage. And I'm going to turn to a passage from a scholar who's at Amherst College, nearby, who talks about the symbolic nature of segregation practices that translate into material advantages for the dominant group. So she says the following, the segregation of public space served a number of purposes beyond ensuring that social association did not take place. As historians understand it, it worked to solidify racial difference, to mark black and white people as different, and one as inferior to the other after the institution of slavery had ended. Glinda Gilmore describes the segregation of public space as essential in reigning in upwardly mobile blacks and keeping them in their place, a place defined by low social status, low income, inability to vote, and low expectations. As a living testament to capabilities, successful black Americans' lives provided a perpetual affront to whites, Gilmore argues, the black lawyer, doctor, preacher, or teacher represented someone out of his or her place. The danger lay not in their numbers, but in the aspirations they inspired in their fellow African Americans and the proof that they gave to the white lie of inherent African inferiority. So there's a functional purpose associated with the swimming pool decision, but I would argue further that there is an assumption embedded in McGee's analysis that when whites deprive blacks of certain kinds of opportunities, they necessarily also deprive themselves of those opportunities. I'm going to suggest that in the instance in which the public swimming pools were closed, access was widely given to whites for private swimming pools, and in the context of the Farmville, Virginia story, the state of Virginia instituted a set of subsidies or additional vouchers that could go into the hands of white parents for the purposes of putting their children in all white private academies. Indeed, we can think about parental choice, the voucher system, as mechanisms that were introduced precisely for the purpose of preserving segregation.  Let's consider the history of land allocation in the late 19th century and early 20th century under the terms of the Homestead Act of 1862. The Homestead Act of 1862 ultimately resulted in the provision of one and a half million white families with 160-acre land allotments per family. Now, 1.5 million white families would constitute at the time approximately nine million people because I would estimate that there would have been about six persons per family. This is long before the family of four, but it's also a lower number than the family of eight or nine. If that's the case, then it would be approximately 10% of the white population by 1920 that received land. In contrast, at most about 10,000 blacks received land under the combination of the Southern Homestead Act and the experience of the exodusters in Kansas, and this would constitute approximately 2% of the black population at the time of emancipation, 4 million people. So, you know, you can clearly have a policy put in place that benefits one group and doesn't benefit the other, and the one group that's benefiting is in a position to exclude the other group from that service, but they're not denying themselves that service. Another example would be the New Deal legislation in the 1930s in which provisions were structured in such a way that eligibility for the New Deal, many of the New Deal benefits was contingent upon the type of employment you had. And so, workers who were serving in domestic positions as well as farm workers were excluded, and this had a vastly disproportionate effect on the black population in terms of access to these provisions. And then a third example is the GI Bill or the Servicemen's Readjustment Act that was passed toward the end of World War II where the provisions for that act included subsidies for home buying as well as for businesses in addition to the educational support elements. And as a consequence of the fact that the administration of the GI Bill was decentralized, local authorities systematically excluded black GIs from having the opportunity to benefit from the home buying and the business subsidy dimensions of it. So, again, whites get the public purses service and blacks are denied it. So, you know, what are folks voting for? They're not voting against their self-interest in that sense. They're voting for public policies that are structured in such a way that they exclude the group that they want to maintain an advantaged position over. Now, we may want to make the argument that in more recent episodes, we've got situations in which we've observed people voting against particular policies that would have benefited both them and blacks and not designing the policies in such a way as to exclude blacks altogether. But I think that you can also make the case that perhaps there are some other reasons why they were opposed to those policies and be glad to pursue that with you in the question and answer period if you like. Now, there's a second set of arguments that are made about how whites are hurt by racism which includes a series of empirical studies. Perhaps the one that's most familiar to people is a city group study that said that discrimination costs the American economy 16 trillion dollars. Now, that may be true, but I'm not sure it's a net loss. And I'm not at all sure that that number is really valid. How did city group come up with this figure? Well, they calculated the difference in income between blacks and whites that they could attribute to discrimination. And then they just said, if we add that level of income to black income, we will have a situation in which the total amount of income in the U.S. economy would have been 16 trillion dollars higher over a series of years. Well, this is an assumption that you could close the income gap simply by snapping your fingers and eliminating the differential in income. But in fact, if your mechanism is eliminating discrimination to try to eliminate discriminatory differentials in income, then you have to think about this process somewhat differently. Let's assume, and I think more than assume, I think the empirical data suggests this, that a climate of discrimination makes white wages higher than the mean and black wages lower than the mean. If you were to eliminate the discriminatory advantage for whites, then presumably while black wages rise as discrimination abates, white wages must actually fall. And so then we have the question about where the average wage rate settles. Does it settle above or below the wage rate that prevailed under discriminatory conditions? Some of this would have to be consequent upon whether or not we are in an environment that is close to full employment or in an environment in which there's high levels of unemployment. So it's contingent. It's uncertain. And if it's uncertain, then large numbers of people will be inclined to stick with the status quo if they perceive the status quo to be to their benefit. More serious set of studies I think are those that attempt to argue that if you have more diverse workforces, you will have higher degrees of productivity and performance. One of these studies is one that was recently done by McKinsey, I think circa 2020. Essentially people refer to this as the business case for ending discrimination or reparations that, you know, the business community would be better off. It would improve its performance. And then I presume there would be aggregate consequences to this. There's a study that Cecilia Conrad did in the early 1990s. And I'm trying to see if her son Conrad Miller, who is also an economist, has done a more recent version of this study. But in her study she used a macroeconomic framework and she asked whether or not changes in diversity in the workforce, changes in workforce demographics would have an effect on national output or national income. And what she found was the following. And this is very interesting. She found that variations in the demographic characteristics of the workforce had no effect on output per head, no effect. So there's no loss as a consequence of diversifying the workforce. There was apparently no gain either. And so if you think about this process in the aggregate, what Conrad's study is suggesting is that there's no variation or improvement or decline in national economic performance as a consequence of varying the degree of diversity of the workforce. Be nice if it was true, but that's not what she finds. If you think about G and P per capita, you can think about the relative incomes of blacks or whites changing under three conditions in which white incomes will fall relative to black incomes, okay? So you could have a circumstance in which both white and black incomes rise but the black income rises at a higher percentage. You could think of a situation in which black incomes rise and white incomes fall or you could think of a situation in which both groups incomes fall but the white proportion that fall is greater. Now the first circumstance is I think is the one that folks are arguing is a situation in which whites are resistant to a set of policies that would benefit them, okay? And that's the really tricky one. So if whites' relative position declines despite an absolute increase in white income then we can think about the question of whether or not there's some sort of false self-interest or false consciousness operating in their decision-making process. But for that to carry through in full, we would have to have a situation in which that change doesn't occur in such a way that there is some kind of damage to the relative position of whites on other dimensions that might be relevant. So I mentioned the fact that there is a difference between claiming that people are irrational and claiming that they have misperceptions and there is no doubt that Americans have a set of misperceptions on a host of issue but in particular they have misperceptions about the degree of inequality in the United States as well as the degree of inequality between blacks and whites in the United States. They grossly underestimate both categories of inequality and they underestimate those categories of inequality whether or not we're talking about income or wealth. Now the consequence maybe particularly if they also think if they are white Americans, if they also think that blacks are catching up in some way, the consequence will be support for policies that would repress black gains. And so the irony here is of course they may be incorrect. There was a tremendous amount of attention drawn to the notion that blacks were making an extreme degree of economic progress as a consequence of the election of Barack Obama. But the symbolic election of Barack Obama did not translate into any significant change in the economic status of black Americans. And so there was a misperception in operation and it led to a set of backlash effects that are reflected in the policies that were pursued by the Trump administration. Now here's the key point. Those policies may have been justified on the basis of misperceptions but they worked in the same direction. That is the direction of preserving white advantage or increasing or expanding white advantage. So it may not have been necessary to adopt those policies but those policies actually accomplished the goal that they were intended to achieve. So my final sets of comments have to do with the phenomenon of tragedy because I think that this whole set of arguments about the possibility that there are some significant losses to the dominant social group as a consequence of its practice of racism is a tragic conclusion. But it is a conclusion that we have to face up to if we're really thinking about making transformational change in this world. And I think we deflect ourselves from a really systematic and consistent effort to try to bring about those changes if we delude ourselves about what the issues really are. Now let me make three comments here in concluding that are associated with these tragic circumstances. First, exploitation and extraction from social group B does not necessarily mean that it will slow growth or adversely affect social group A. That's a key point. Exploitation and extraction doesn't necessarily mean that it will slow growth for the economy as a whole or reduce the economic well-being of social group A. Now an argument could be made that it adversely affects a subset of social group A. And that's the white working class kind of argument once again. But we have a tremendous amount of evidence that under a regime of racism, even the lowest income whites have some significant advantages, particularly in comparison with blacks as a whole. I would include in this database the fact that whites, regardless of their income level, have far superior differential treatment by the police from blacks of any class status. I would also add to this list the fact that whites in the lowest 20% of the income distribution have a net worth of approximately $15,000. Blacks in the lowest 20% of the income distribution have a net worth that is approximately zero. And the last time I looked, the ratio of any number to zero approaches infinity. And in addition, in W.E.B. Du Bois' famous discussion of the psychological wage that goes to lower income whites, he actually lists a set of advantages that are quite material, including their access to public spaces and their capacity of their children to go to the same public schools that are attended by other whites who are more affluent. So that's the first big point that an exploitative economy is not necessarily an economy that doesn't do well in an aggregate sense. And the history of enslavement in the United States should make that transparent, given the significance of the cotton textile sector, slave grown cotton, and the way in which the American economy developed particularly industrially in the latter half of the 19th century. Second point I'd like to make here concerns the nature of the political obstacle that is associated with the recognition that everyone is not hurt by racism. And in fact, significant numbers of people are not hurt by racism. We could flip the story around in terms of the relative numbers if we're thinking about a country like South Africa under apartheid. Ironically, of course, South Africa in terms of its overall per capita income was virtually the most affluent economy on the African continent. The distribution of that income was quite perverse. But, you know, again, if you're thinking about the dynamics of economic growth, once again, we have a situation in which high degrees of exploitation, we could refer to super exploitation, not necessarily associated with lower overall economic performance. And so this means we do have a serious political obstacle because if we are going to try to pursue an interstructural racism, if we're going to attempt to introduce a program of reparations for black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States, we have to recognize that this will not necessarily be beneficial to white Americans. And that makes the task of persuading the nation, a majority of the nation, to go that route much, much harder. Then related to this is the third and final point that I want to make is eliminating structural racism, introducing a comprehensive program of reparations necessarily will make the relative position of white Americans worse, the relative position. But the best we can do is ensure to the greatest extent possible that we do not harm white's absolute position. We don't make things worse. So in the work that I've done with Kirsten Mullen on reparations, we made the argument that if you're going to design a program of national reparations, you should do so in such a way that you don't actually increase taxes significantly for any Americans. And our rationale for thinking about designing the program that way was precisely this, that we did not want to introduce a program that would adversely affect the absolute position for white Americans. But we do have to confront the reality that the relative position will change. Actually, it should change. It must change. But if that relative position changes, then we have to have a society in which the commitment to racial advantage has diminished. And I'm not really sure how we get from here to there, particularly in the present moment. It may be easier to talk about that in this particular community, folks who have come to hear me speak this evening. But there are large segments of the American public who are not going to be particularly receptive to a change in their relative position, even if their absolute position would improve. Certainly not if their absolute position in some way declined. And so the answer to my question that I posed as the title of my talk is no.  And it's unfortunate in a way that it doesn't because it makes it much more hard to think about ways in which we get to a better world. Thank you. Provocative and very rich, rich talk. So we're going to move to the question and answer period. This talk in this event is being live streamed. And so we need to use the mics. So if you have comments, questions for Professor Sandy Darity, what I'm going to ask you to do is just walk up to the center microphone and speak into that mic. I'm putting the hat on because my head is a little chilly. So the mic is open for anyone. Professor Darity, for those of us who are not economists or academics, could you give an example of how white people's absolute position, what the absolute position is and relative position in life is? Just an example, like a literal one, for people we know, what would that look like? How it would stay the same or it would change? Yeah, well, so I mentioned that if you look at the folks in the bottom 20% of the income distribution, the median net worth for white households is about $15,000 and it's about zero for black households. So we could hypothetically think about a situation in which those proportions changed. One way in which those proportions could change is for both black wealth and white wealth to increase. And suppose black wealth at the median for this lowest income group went to, say, $5,000. And white wealth went to $17,000. The ratio of white to black wealth would decline, but each group would have a higher absolute amount of wealth. And that's the circumstance in which, you know, if that were something that we could predict would happen as a consequence of a particular policy, that's the situation, I think, in which people are saying, well, you know, if white folks are opposed to that, that there's some sort of irrationality in their decision. And I'm saying that, you know, we have to think about what the full array of manifestations would be of the consequences of that kind of change to have a better sense. But the other circumstances in which you might have an increase in black wealth relative to white wealth are circumstances which I think are more transparent and generally negative for whites. So one of those circumstances could be a situation in which both black and white wealth fell, but white wealth fell more. And so you would have not only a decline in relative position, but you would have an absolute loss that's taking place for whites. Another circumstance is one in which black wealth goes up and white wealth goes down. And of course, we would think that there would be opposition to that arrangement as well. So the arrangement that we have to think about most carefully is a situation in which there's an improvement in black economic outcome and there is no change or an improvement in white economic outcomes, but the white gain is not proportionately as large as the black gain. Yeah. It is chilly down here. You're not imagining it. I've been studying education policy in the United States for close to 30 years now. And it seems like we've had this system that works very badly for students of color, particularly black students for generations. We see policies that come up that are intended or at least ostensibly intended to fix that problem and we don't fix the problem. So I'm curious to hear your take on who's benefiting from this circumstance because I feel like somebody must be. So there's a body of literature that we have incorporated into stratification economics that refers to the phenomenon of non-competing groups. A non-competing group is a group that has been subjected to a set of processes that prevent them from being as effective contestants in labor markets. So one argument you could make about the objective or purpose of having this type of poor schooling arrangements is that the goal is to diminish the competitiveness of black Americans in labor markets. And that works to the advantage of white Americans. Another kind of argument that I think is relevant is the notion of opportunity hoarding and preserving positions for one's own offspring. So we can think about very affluent communities or comparatively affluent college communities like Amherst where the process of classroom assignment, access to instruction and curriculum is racially differentiated. And this would mean that you would be preserving more opportunities for the white kids who are more likely to take a larger number of AP courses or I don't know if they have international baccalaureate in Amherst, they definitely do endure them. But this notion of racialized course assignment is another mechanism for preserving advantage or opportunity for one's own group. And that's something that's conducted by very affluent white families. So that would be my understanding. Now, is there some kind of economic loss? Well, there are people who make the argument that you're depriving very talented individuals with the degree of human capital that they could attain and that that slows down economic growth. That would only be true in an environment in which labor markets are consistently very tight. But if you're in an environment where there is unemployment, then, you know, there's a lot of flexibility in terms of who you hire and who you don't hire. And it may not matter very much if there are significant numbers of people who are denied the opportunity to really develop their talents. Now, the argument that I might concede to the folks who say that everybody might be hurt by racism is that this process of denying black people of the opportunity to fully develop their talents and abilities may create a creativity disadvantage for the entire society. A loss of innovation, a loss of new ideas, and that's particularly important in a challenging setting in which we're confronted with the possibility of full scale mechanization and actually the elimination of employment for all human beings. But, you know, I don't know if within the core of the black community there are young people who have the ideas that would help us better cope with that type of social environment. But it is a possibility and we definitely have denied ourselves those ideas and talents. You mentioned earlier about white folks voting against certain policies that might have been to their advantage and you were going to get back to that and talk to what some of those policies might have been and why they might have done that. Well, actually I was suggesting that historically they have voted for policies that benefit them and have ensured that blacks are frequently excluded from those kinds of benefits. So they don't have to reject a policy because it will benefit blacks since they can adopt the policy and make sure that blacks don't actually get it. Now, I don't know, there are some more recent episodes that people are claiming fit the mold of biting your nose despite your face, but I invite others to indicate what they think those are. But yeah, my point is, you know, white America has never had to deny itself something because it also wanted to deny it from blacks. Hi. Thank you very much for your talk. I'm a behavioral economist, so I especially enjoyed hearing the references to behavioral econ. So one of the things that I think is interesting about your talk was when you mentioned this preference that people have explicitly for an existing racial hierarchy. And one of the things that I study in subject to well-being, it talks about relative preferences and how the way that that has impacted subject to well-being over time has changed. So I guess my question is, do you think that there's a way that this preference for racial hierarchy could change over time? And also to the extent, do you think that our reference groups might be being impacted by things like media or things like that? Yeah. So yes, I do think preferences can change. I think that's the potential ray of hope in a way. I'm not sure how best you do that. I'm trying to say that we should not try to do it propagandistically. And that's why I have reservations about the argument that large numbers of whites are hurt by racism. I mean, if you go back to the court case in 1954 and the testimony from Kenneth Clark that was built into that court case, Clark's position was that white kids were hurt by school segregation. And I've never understood that argument. I don't know. Maybe he's making some kind of argument about their moral or character development or something like that. But I don't know of any substantive way. In fact, I think that when kids are in school, they don't really think very much about who else is not there. And so, yeah, I hope taste and preferences can change, but I'm not really sure how you go about doing that. I'm just saying I don't like the strategy of making an argument that is essentially not accurate as the basis for trying to propel that change. Thank you for a wonderful talk. My question, you sort of answered part of it already. I'm interested in what you see as the sort of political strategy for movement building that comes out of stratification economics and sort of what social movements can take out of that, aside from not making these propagandistic arguments. And then the second part of my question is, given the body of work in stratification economics, how do you explain interracial movement, civil rights movement, solidarity organizing that has happened and or that could happen? So in the paper that was published in the Journal of Economic Literature almost a year ago now, there's a section where I talk about the whole question of the political position of members of a dominant social group who in some way appear to be defecting from the dominant social group. And what are the conditions, who they might be? One of the arguments I try to make is that this is probably a segment of the community of dominant individuals who feel most secure about their position and status and probably don't feel like they will be very much affected if there is a change. And so, you know, can we expand that group or that pool? I don't know. This gets back to the question that was raised about changing taste. But I tried to struggle with that a bit. I'm not sure if I came up with any answers that would be satisfying, but please take a look at that. It's a beginning. Yeah. Thank you, Professor. There was a revealing talk. I came with the assumption that white working class is actually voting against its own well-being, but I'm largely convinced. You're fittingly started with the Indian case, right? And in the Indian case, I can understand because Ambedkar calls it as a graded system, the caste system as the graded system. So there are sections of the oppressed group, votes with the oppressor because there is somebody even below the oppressed group. There is a Brahmin and there is a middle caste and there are Dalits. So it is possible that the middle caste votes with the Brahmins because they retain the relative advantage over the Dalits. So at the end of your talk, I'm very much convinced to understand the voting patterns of the dominant social group. I'm coming from the recent evidence that the black community, the voting percentage in the recent election has increased. So is there a similar kind of a graded system that we can use to understand how the black communities would increase in the recent election it ordered for Trump compared to the 2016 election? So I'm not sure I can answer that question at all. I mean, I think of the United States as being a society in which there's what you're describing as a graded system as well. And I think what Patrick Mason has a new book called The Economics of Structural Racism. Isabelle Wilkinson has a book called Cast in which she's trying to argue that you could use the concept of cast to better understand what's happening in the United States. I would argue that what she means by cast, the way she's interpreting cast, she says, let's use cast instead of racism. But I would say that structural racism is exactly what she means by cast. And so I think that the notion that there's a graded, a gradational structure for the US population is actually quite, quite accurate. That gradational structure has ethnic correlations. And in the Indian context, you might want to argue that cast position has certain characteristics of ethnic variation. But you may not want to make that argument, but I think that's the real difference. So in the United States, for example, and this is really making use of, I think, of an overly aggregated category. But you could say that Asians have a position that has a certain degree of proximity to whiteness with an element of disdain. But there, along with whites, they are closer to the top end of the gradational structure. Blacks and Latinos are toward the bottom, but it's not necessarily all Latinos. It depends on which country they're from. So Dominicans and Puerto Ricans are at the bottom. And no question. But I think there's a gradational structure. Yeah, I think it's similar now. In terms of its implications for voting, that's tougher. I'm not sure. Yeah. Thanks, Andy, for a great talk. I guess I'll ask an obvious question, which is the extent to which your kind of analysis can be integrated into a broader set of class analysis. So that, for example, when we talk about the working class in general, in 1970, the difference between the corporate CEO pay and the average worker was about 15 to 1, and now it's 300 to 1. Yep. And so to what extent can we think about a class framework for engendering equality, operating in correspondence with raising the relative position of African-Americans? Yeah. So first of all, I think that that change in the disparity in CEO pay with regular line workers is indicative of the failure of human capital theory. Or unless you want to argue that that differential is attributable entirely to profit sharing. OK, but if you treat it as a wage, then human capital theory is nonsense. OK, so wage is not equal to marginal productivity. I can't imagine anybody claiming a CEO is 300 to 400 times as productive as a line worker. But OK. But that said, the way I've attempted to think about the relationship or interaction between class and social identity grouping is to think about a world in which there are two ladders. And one ladder has a higher base than the other, and it also has a higher apex than the other. And so we can think about individuals from each of these social identity groups having a position along these ladders. And if you think about the intergroup comparison, then individuals on each of these ladders are thinking about how the typical person is doing in each of these groups. But they're also making a comparison about their own position on their own group's ladder with other folks who are on that ladder. And they may, under some circumstances, compare their position on their group's ladder with the potential position that they might hold if they were in the other group. And it's the ladder case in which I try to talk about the foundations for people engaging in acts of passing from the dominant group to the subordinate group. This is kind of the paradoxical form of passing. Rachel Dallazole for those who are trying to think about that. So what are the circumstances in which that occurs? And if you make an argument that there are these two adjacent ladders, but one has a higher base and a higher apex than the other, it becomes possible for some individuals who are in the dominant group to perceive that they might actually have a relatively higher status in the subordinate group in the zone of overlap. And then they may make the decision if they are able to try to pass from high to low. And so that's how I think about it. But I think the ladder metaphor is really very, very useful. And you can think about the ladders shifting their positions, you know, one of them moving further up. One of the things that's critical in all of this is the phenomenon of last place aversion. So as long as the dominant group's ladder has a higher base than the subordinate group's ladder, it ensures that all the members of the dominant group can avoid being in the last place. And so this is sort of the way I've been trying to think about it. I'm not sure that that's dynamic enough for the purposes you have in mind, but that's how I've been trying to work through these. Yeah. Thanks. I have a question. I was struck by your saying that an exploitative economy is not necessarily a badly working economy. And the reason I am asking about this is that one of the ways, as I've been engaging with your work and thinking about stratification economics, I've been thinking a lot about its relationship to understandings of racial capitalism. And I would argue that the claim of racial capitalism is and where one would lead from where your talk was going is that an exploitative economy is consequently a productive economy. That that is what we mean when we say racial capitalism, that the production is primarily via the exploitation. So I'm wondering about the choice that seems to me from just reading your work to be an explicit choice to not choose that framing, to choose the stratification economics framing, which is perhaps less seen as a thing that is racial capitalism that has whatever, a meaning beyond just the phrase stratification economics. I'm wondering if you can talk about that choice to frame the work that way. Yeah, there's a group that I met with, I think Nancy Fulbright is a participant in that group, that's looking at the question of the future of capitalism or something like that. And so I was focusing on this notion that actually there are many elements of the current social order that I would say are non-capitalistic. And that really reflect the rise to dominance of, well, Nancy didn't like my use of this phrase, the rise to dominance of unproductive labor. And she didn't like my use of that phrase because it made it sound like reproductive labor was not productive. But I didn't mean the term in the context of biological reproduction at all. I meant it in the sense that unproductive labor is a labor that does not produce, does not directly produce surplus value, does not directly produce profit, if you will. And so this would include folks like us who are academics, right? We're not productive labor in that sense, okay? And the term unproductive labor doesn't mean that folks are socially unnecessary, okay? But it does mean that we're more likely to be living off of surplus value than we are producing it. And so in that context, I was arguing that we still would be likely to have hierarchical conditions in this so-called post-capitalist society. And as long as we have conditions of hierarchy, it creates an incentive for some social groups to coalesce to create a situation in which they do not have to be subjected to the worst positions in the society and that they potentially could have access to the topmost positions. And so racism and racialization is not, from that perspective, something that is specific to capitalism. So racial, there probably is no other, there's nothing, historically, we've always had racial capitalism, okay, you know, from the point of the transatlantic slave trade and its role in the development of the capitalist system. But the elimination of capitalism does not necessarily mean the elimination of racism, which I link to hierarchy in general. So, yeah. Thank you. Thank you for your talk. Okay. As long as I can remember them, okay. Please help me remember the questions. Okay. Yeah. Your last couple of answers might roll into my question. So before my academic life and previous life, I worked in civil rights in South Side Virginia, including Farmville, and labor organizing in North and South Carolina. And so I'm going to give you an opportunity to knock down one of my last remaining idealistic notions from those days. In the Cone Mills and Burlington Mills efforts to organize, we had the Klan counterpicketing. We had white workers getting up and saying, tearing up their Klan card and saying, they're with a company, I'm with Joe over here, the black worker. And we were very hopeful about building the kind of interracial solidarity that would make it possible to move everyone's interest forward. Now, it's interesting in the textile industry, that latter you're talking about, the jobs were divided in such a way. There was pretty obvious if you looked over here, you didn't want that job. You wanted this job. So that one made it hard. GE Plant in South Carolina, we succeeded because we didn't meet class solidarity across racial lines work. I guess my question as I'm listening to your talk is, is that notion dead?  You know, the idea that black and white solidarity in the working class could have made a difference in everyone's living. I used to live in Montgomery too, so I know I walked by that swimming pool which is now covered with grass. And there were not subsidies for white kids to go to private pools. They went to the river and probably some drowned. So is that notion dead? My Farmville example is correct, but my swimming pool example isn't. Right. Yeah, I mean, and there are probably other examples we could find where there were no subsidies for all kinds of things that white, lower, on the lower economic level, were not given. But I mean, yeah, you've got a great point. But where would the economy be if labor solidarity had existed? Capitalism had other ways of suppressing the labor movement. But had that succeeded, where would we be? Would we be any different? So I guess my question about what we would have is, what is it we would have had? Is it a society that would have leveled hierarchy? And if it didn't, then there would still be a foundation or a basis for racism to operate. Because essentially what it does is not only does it give a segment of the dominant group disproportionate access to the top, but it also prevents them from having to be at the very bottom. And so they're insulated. So if you think about the black, white unemployment rate gap, the black unemployment rate is always twice as high as the white rate. And it's normal for a society of our type to generate some level of unemployment. So who bears the brunt of having to be in the unemployed category? Well, it's pretty clear. So what would happen in a society that was a product of the efforts of a racially unified group of workers to make change? And I don't know what kind of society would emerge. I would advocate that. But I'm not exactly sure what the ultimate product would be. I mean, I think of all of these instances in which we've been very optimistic. I mean, the Arab Spring. And then we look at what actually evolves. And it's just hard to say. But that's really a key question, is working class solidarity a possibility? And if so, what would be the effects of it? Thank you. Thanks for coming today. Are there any trends within the black community, such as higher crime rates or higher illegitimacy rates that could explain their position vis-a-vis whites in Kansas East Lane by some dominant social group? No. No to the first one or the second one? No to both. So there's no. There's a propagandistic mechanism that's a float about black illegitimacy and black criminality. I guess it depends on what kind of crime you have in mind. If we think about which community in the United States has the highest degree of history of violence, that's unquestionably white Americans. Unquestionably.  So there's no segment of the population that has a greater history of violence than white Americans. So when you talk about these kinds of matters to me, you're actually mouthing a set of propagandistic claims that are made on the right in the United States and they do not have a foundation, in fact. All right, so. Sorry, last quick question. You talked about sort of the difference in wage, like black wage being on average below white wage and white wage being sort of on average above the mean. And I kind of want to get back to the couple of questions that have been asked about class, not to harp on class with you. But so from your perspective, what segment of whites is it the white working class, white wage earning class, or the white petite bourgeois or the white bourgeois that has the most to lose from reparations policy? Well, no, I mean, when you say lose again. In relative terms. Well, it could be, yeah, I mean, it depends on what kind of reparations plan it is. So the one that we have in mind that Kirsten Mullin and I have developed is our objective is to make sure that there's not an absolute loss. I don't know if that answers your question. Yeah, but yes, there would have to be a relative change. I mean, if your goal is to say, for example, you want to equalize wealth between blacks and whites, and you do it at the average, you would end up in a situation where black median wealth would be higher than white median wealth, even though mean wealth would be the same between the two groups. If you gave every eligible black American the same amount of money. And so there's no way you could institute a serious reparations plan without altering the relative position of whites. But you could potentially design one so you don't alter their absolute position. The dismal science. Actually, you should look at the etymology of that phrase. On the Negro question, huh? Well, yeah, but it doesn't have anything really to do with pessimism about economics as a field. It has to do with an individual who was actually advocating or making the case for the benefits of slavery. So that was what was dismal about it. Here is the thing. When I first began kind of studying economics of discrimination, one of the books tossed around was Gary Beckers, The Economics of Discrimination. And it's useful to note that his work was regarded as confronting economic effects of discrimination in the marketplace because of race and other non-pecuniary considerations, and that he demonstrated that discrimination in the marketplace by any group reduces their own real incomes as well as those of the minority. Now is that kind of thinking based upon what you were presenting tonight no longer mainstream to use the chair's phrase? Or is there still a dominant portion of economics that sees that way of thinking more so than stratification? That's only a sustainable argument if you assume you have continuous full employment. Yeah. Because what that argument is, it's based on that human capital junk again, that what you're doing is you're reducing total output because there is a segment of your population whose human capital is not being adequately rewarded. But it's tricky because there is another segment of the population that's getting over rewarded. So I'm not even sure Becker's initial formulation is exactly right, but to the extent that you want to say that there's a logical foundation for the argument, you must be assuming there's no unemployment. So it was Becker that led me to conclude that rationality itself is a problem. As a tool of analysis and understanding the world, that it has a limited view, and that doesn't mean just because something isn't rational, it's irrational. I often refer to our identities as non-rational. They're amalgam of rules. So just because it's a rule-based system of if then, doesn't mean it's rational. And the amalgam that we have often has many contradictions and paradoxes look no farther than our own families. So seriously, I think. And then not that I have any better ideas for how this is all going to come out. So one other point was when you said if we increased disadvantaged black income and white income would go down when it fall above or below the mean, the question is, how does economic productivity occur, increase in productivity? And I believe there's plenty of cases that you would show will go above the mean. I absolutely agree that white folks are going to be looking at 1% to 2% and black folks and others. That dichotomy, too, is problematic. It will be above the mean if you look at the. The dichotomy, the bilateral dichotomy is fundamental to the history of this country. Yeah, I agree. And I think that's part of the issue. So I think reparations are not enough. We need preparations, which means that we need a more dynamic picture to prepare the society for and shouldn't slow anything down, but that just giving folks money that was taken from them historically is a good thing. But in the long run, we're going to revert to that other mean unless there are other preparations for how we reorder our society. So I'm a fervent advocate of something that a small number of us have referred to as an economic bill of rights for the 21st century, which would include a federal job guarantee. It would include a guarantee of either national health insurance or a national health service and some other components. So I definitely subscribe to the view that we need a structural change in our society as a whole. But I guess I don't have the view that you necessarily have to do that first, given how long we have delayed on reparations. That's what I meant, no delay. But the concept of belonging, a little of which we understood and that we try to use rationality to describe whether it's rational or irrational, is inadequate. And in stratification economics, I'm taking the notion of group attachment as, I don't know. I hate to use this term. Axiomatic? Yeah. OK. I'm taking that as axiomatic. Then I'm asking what kinds of taste and preferences would people have given that identification? And it's complex because we have cultural multiplicity. I got one last part. We the older, I'm older than you. We the older teaching the young in a changing world. What is it that we're going to be teaching them? Well, of course. OK. We are at the end of our program for tonight.