American Wealth Disparity
Professors: Edwards and Welburn
Units: 1.0
Elective Course
Concentration: Policy Analysis
Research, Analysis, and Design Stream: Modeling Human Systems
This course will introduce the theory of wealth creation, trends in American wealth disparity, inequity and racial wealth gaps, and proposed policy interventions. While this course will build a broad understanding of contributions to wealth, the course will focus on the role of racial inequities. The course will emphasize the following topics as learning objectives:
- Economic models of intergenerational wealth (i.e., overlapping generations)
- Long term trends in income and wealth and their disparities
- The historical contribution of policy to wealth expansion and disparity
- The acute problem of systemic racism and the current racial wealth gap
- Policies on reparations from atonement, to wealth transfer, to calculating harm, to proposed approaches for addressing inequality