Sunday, September 30, 2018

Michigan, Harvard partner to solve poverty in Detroit

This is fantastic news for my hometown, Detroit. and Harvard University have formed new partnerships to bring actionable change through research and community engagement. With Harvard's new president, Lawrence Bacow, a native Michigander, supporting the effort, this project will bring immense opportunities for researchers to study and propose effective interventions that help the residents of Detroit.

From the alumni magazine, Michigan Today:

The University of Michigan and Harvard University are forming two new partnerships designed to spur economic mobility and reduce poverty in Detroit, as well as combine resources and expertise in response to the national opioid crisis.

The Equality of Opportunity Project — led by Harvard faculty members Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren and Brown University’s John Friedman — will work with U-M’s Poverty Solutions initiative, led by Luke Shaefer, U-M faculty member and Poverty Solutions director.

The universities will collaborate with the city of Detroit and local partners on an action plan to identify promising, results-based interventions for improving the livelihoods of low-income Detroit residents.

Sunday, April 1, 2018

AP study: Blacks largely left out among high-paying jobs

The black unemployment rate is still problematic fifty years after both the release of the Kerner Commission Report and Martin Luther King's assassination. In one of his final speeches, King described the “Other America,” where unemployment and underemployment created a “fatigue of despair” for African-Americans. Today, this "Other America" has extended into the highest paid occupations, notably in the STEM fields, in cities ranging from a history of racial discord (Boston) to high cost-of-living (Silicon Valley).
An Associated Press analysis of government data has found that black workers are chronically underrepresented compared with whites in high-salary jobs in technology, business, life sciences, and architecture and engineering, among other areas. Instead, many black workers find jobs in low-wage, less-prestigious fields where they’re overrepresented, such as food service or preparation, building maintenance and office work, the AP analysis found.