TRIGGERnometry - Harvard Professor: The Facts About Police Brutality - Roland Fryer

Episode Date: June 16, 2024

Roland Fryer is an American economist and tenured professor at Harvard University. He received a PhD in economics from Pennsylvania State University in 2002 and completed postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago with Gary Becker. He joined the faculty of Harvard University and rapidly rose through the academic ranks becoming, at age 30, their second-youngest professor. In 2019, he published an analysis that found black and Hispanic Americans were no more likely than white Americans to be shot by police in a given interaction with police. The paper: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701423?mobileUi=0& Watch the Munk Debate: Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism? Live June 17th. Join today to live stream. Click here: https://bit.ly/munk_debate Monetary Metals: Buy gold and earn interest on it! Find out more at https://monetary-metals.com/triggernometry/ Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, you, feeling hungry? Run the Denny's Four. The new attorney everyday value slam. Part of Denny's slam-and-meal deals. And see the new Masters of the Universe movie, only in theaters June 5th. I thought I was going to be able to show that the police were biased very easily. And then we gathered literally millions and millions of data points on lethal use of force. What we found was zero racial differences.

And that is the part that made people really, really. upset, really angry. Lack of bias made people upset and angry. Yes, yeah. Yes, the world was turning upside down. Yes, there were threats against me and my family. Police are rationally responding to what they view as threats, right? When I embedded myself in the Houston Police Department,

I noticed that independent of the skin color, the police officer was really scared when he pulled someone over. I asked him why. He says, man, this is Texas. We assume everyone's got a gun. Roland, it's awesome to have you on the show. I've been tracking your work for a very long time. The conversation you had with our good friend, Barry Weiss, was one of the most interesting

and funny things that I've ever seen. As it turns out, you're a former stand-up, or you did stand-up for a while. But before we get into your work and your opinions, there was one particular incident that obviously changed the course of your life quite profoundly. You're this super-promising economist. You've done incredibly well from a very difficult background. get into that position. You're very promising. You do this one study about police brutality and police violence against black suspects in particular. And then you're suddenly under police

protection for over a month and all sorts of other crazy stuff happens. Tell us about that. What happened? What happened in the study or what happened to me? Both. Both. Yeah. Well, in the study, it was, I was, it started back in 2014 when we all, uh, we all, uh, They were kind of mesmerized by what was going on with Michael Brown, et cetera. And there were protests happening around the country, and I wanted to do something, but protesting is not my thing. I mean, other folks go for it, but it's not my thing. But I wanted to do something that I thought would help.

So I thought this was going to be the easiest thing I'd ever done. So I went and tried to collect some data, and I thought I was going to be able to show that the police were biased very easily. I grew up in the south, partly in Florida, partly in Texas. And I grew up not liking the police. So I just thought this was literally the easiest thing I'd ever done. And a colleague came to me and said, what are you working on these days? I said, oh, I'm just about to write this great paper showing the police advice.

And he says, interesting. What do you think the police are maximizing? What do you think their side of the story is? What does maximizing mean just for people who are they solving for? When they go to work every day, what are their set of incentives? What are they after? What are they trying to achieve at work? And it's something that I had not thought about at all.

It was embarrassing, right? And so I made arrangements to figure out how to actually do ride-alongs with the police. And in fact, you guys should do ride-alongs. You should be good at it. Yeah, you should do it and bring a weapon. And it's, I don't recommend doing it in Camden. That was the first city I had done it in. Where is Camden?

By the way. Camden, New Jersey. It's, you know, a city that has at least had a lot of crime and especially given it's relatively small, it's close to Philadelphia. And so here we are on the ride-alongs. And I'm embarrassed to tell you, like, after a few hours, I became the worst police officer you could ever imagine, right? Everyone I saw it like a criminal, right? Like, I was going around and the cops were like, you really should not be a cop. Because I would go around and I'd say, what's that guy doing during, you know, dribbling that basketball looks suspicious to me. Let's pull him over. What do you mean? Let's pull him up. Anyway, I did this. And then we gathered literally millions and millions of data points on police use of force.

And I, again, thought that this was going to show all sorts of bias. What we found was that in the kind of non-lethal uses of force, so pushing someone up against a car or drawing your weapon on them but not arresting them or pushing them on the ground. Those types of uses of force, there are large racial differences. There's real racial bias in those uses of force. In fact, just here in New York, a black person during that time was 50% more likely to have force used on them in any given interaction with the police officers. Crazy, right?

That was lower-level uses of force. But then we also collected data from 16 different cities across the U.S. on lethal use of force, the kind of force used on Michael Brown and others. And that's what the protesting really was about. And in those situations, what we found was zero racial differences in police use of force. And that is the part that made people really, really upset, really angry. Lack of bias made people upset and angry. Yes. Yeah. And in fact, one of the, you know, I talked to a newspaper reporter before the paper was even public.

And he says, I wouldn't write about this. The first part's obvious and the second part's wrong. What do you do about that? And so we released those results. And look, I'm skipping over a lot of stuff here. I mean, not only did we think we did a rigorous job in the actual analysis, but then we literally, when we got these very surprising results, hired new research assistants, had them do it all over again

just to make sure that they were robust, right? Like we, I was a little worried about, not worried, but I wanted to be sensitive about putting results like this out into the world because they were also counter to my own beliefs. But we did. And yeah, I'd say that, you know, for a while, I thought, yes, the world was turning upside down. Yes, there were threats against me and my family. But the interesting part was there were thousands and thousands of emails. that came from places like Kansas and Colorado and everywhere across the U.S. who said, wow, thanks for actually using data to shed at least some light on this.

And I've got the following 30,000 questions. But at least you're bringing real analysis to this question because our cities are literally burning and no one's talking about what the actual facts are. So thank you. And I engaged with lots of people on that dimension. But yes, I was very, very surprised at how upset, you know, fellow academics got. You know, as I've said before, I was taken to the side and said, you're going to ruin your career. And I naively thought we were in this to actually develop a set of facts.

I actually thought that's what tenure was for. I didn't. I later realized it was for drinking and Chardonnay at 1030 in the morning. But at that point, I thought tenure was four. going after the truth, even if it was unpopular, and that the university was going to protect you from whatever may come of you being a real social scientist, or at least following the facts as you saw fit. So it, you know, we produced this result. I'm still very, very proud of the work we did, but I highly underestimated the response.

Roland, there's something, before we get into all of that, you said the, I think in the study, and quote me if I'm wrong, black and Hispanic people are more likely to see, to be pushed around by the police, suffer physical force, et cetera, et cetera. Do we know why that is particularly, is it that people from those types of communities are more likely to see the police as a threat and therefore they're more likely to resist arrest? Is it that the police going more aggressively? Do we know what is actually happening? It's a great question.

We don't have a perfect answer on that, but we have some threads. So one of the most interesting coefficients in that study to me is that when the police report that a suspect is fully compliant, they were not arrested, and no contraband was found, nothing went wrong in this traffic stop, as reported by the police. Blacks are 25% more likely to have force used on them even in those interactions. Wow. Right? And so, you know, yes, there's some police departments who have written to me and says, you know, you're saying use of force, but what you really mean is response to resistance.

And no, that's not what I mean. I mean use of force here because even in situations where, again, I can't emphasize this is enough. The police report, they are fully compliant, right? That took a lot of flack for people saying, how dumb can you be? You use police reports. Well, stop and think for a second. If the police are reported it and they still, you can still find bias in that data, you can really believe it. See what I'm saying?

And so the police report them being fully compliant. And yet there's still a large racial difference in the use of force. So I don't know exactly why that is. We did some very, a set of pretty rigorous bias test. So we actually think there is just, it's racial, part of it is racial discrimination, not all of it. Some of it can be explained also by the behavior of civilians. That also differs, but it can't explain all of it. So I think there's enough kind of, not fault, but there's enough, both sides of that equation that you described,

civilians acting differently, police potentially being biased. We find evidence for both of those. And now the key question is, what can we actually do about it? Right? And what we try to propose is a way to work with police departments to eliminate this type of bias because I think it's at the root of a lot of the discontent in black neighborhoods between the police and civilians. Look, if we admit that some of the racial differences in police use of force are due to bias, and then there's a controversial shooting, it's almost irrational for someone in the community not to believe that the shooting before you saw this data, right? You'd say, well, on the things I do know, I know there's discrimination.

On the thing I can't really observe, I wasn't at the shooting, probably was discrimination, right? And so I think this is a point that we don't make enough, but if it's hard to negotiate with the police, with the police directly on shootings, right? Hold your weapon. That's hard. You know, their lives are at stake too. Yeah. But on the lower level uses of force, right, every department I've talked to privately knows that they,

there's, there are things that they can do better on the lower level uses of force that would then garner community support so that we could actually have productive conversations when a controversial shooting happens. Roland, sorry, Francis, I feel like we're getting into the meat of the conversation, which is great, but I want to take one quick detail before we carry on. Which is you said something that I think in the moment that we're sitting here is a very interesting conversation to at least explore, which, as you said, protesting isn't for me. Why?

There are many ways of making a difference, right? And, you know, I don't begrudge anybody who wants to have free expression and to protest. Great. It's just an economic lingo. It's not my comparative advantage. Okay. Right? I am a data nerd.

So when I see a problem, my first inclination is not to stand up and protest. My first inclination is, let me get a bunch of data and prove to people why this is what's actually going on here. And, you know, to make real social progress, maybe you need both. And I'm sure some of the people who are about protesting are saying, well, numbers aren't my thing. Great, you do your thing and I'll do mine. But it's not that I have anything against it in any way, shape, or form. It's not just for me. And the other quick detail I wanted to take, and I'm posing this in a very kind of devil's advocate kind of way.

My read of you is you're someone who cares about the truth, who's prepared to be the outlier, who's prepared to say the unpopular thing from various conversations that I've seen you have. So how true is it that you did this study out of a desire to prove that the police are biased? Was there a part of you that was kind of, I'm going to like find something out here that's going to be different to what everyone else is saying? The exact opposite. It was, wow, I'm going to finally find something people are going to like me. Yeah. No, it's not, um, I'm going to find something people are going to like me. Oh boy, were you wrong. Yeah, no, it's it is not, I promise.

I do not get up in the morning thinking, let me try to stir the Kool-Aid today, right? Like that is not my view. On the other hand, you know, sorry, my fellow academics. They don't, I'm not afraid of them, right? Like, they don't, you know, they don't intimidate me in any way, shape, or form. And so I'm not scared to say what I'm, I believe is the truth. But I'm not an instigator.

I hate when people call me controversialists. I don't want to be, right? I think people who stick to bullshit, even though it doesn't fit the facts, that's controversial. People who follow the data wherever they lead. I mean, isn't that social science? And so, no, I literally thought

this is going to be the easiest paper I'd ever written because I'd just come off of paying kids to learn. Oh, my God. Gosh, you know, now people pay kids to learn. They're like, this is interesting. But back in 2008, this was horrible. I mean, I was compared to the Tuskegee experiments, literally, right? Can you imagine that?

Get up one day. You go to work and there's someone with the picket, speaking of protests, and someone with the picket sign who said, Roland Fryer is the worst thing for black people, says the Tuskegee experiments. What are they? Because I don't know what they are. Oh, okay. Well, let me give you the dichotomy here.

Paying kids on the one hand to do the things that will help. them later in life, unknowingly injecting people with syphilis. You do the math, right? Crazy. Like just crazy. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, that's what that's what happened. Why you surprised? Anytime anyone has the wrong opinion now, they're literally Hitler. This is basically it. Yeah. It's the same thing. It's crazy, right? So I had just come off of that, and then we had done this work in Houston where we took the worst schools in Houston and did all we could to reform them. And so through that education journey, and we'd written some papers on charter schools that

people didn't love, I thought, this is my chance. People are going to really, finally, like something that I do. The thing that I found disappointing from the reaction and the inevitable fallout, where it's inevitable now with the benefit of hindsight, is your report, as we've touched, raised some really interesting points, which actually If we look to the results dispassionately, there are things that we all need to work on, particularly the police. And actually, if we address them, we could make relations between the African American community and the police so much better. And actually, we could have, as a result of that, a more cohesive society.

Look, where were you in 2016? Keeping my head down, mate, that's where I'm like. That guy's controversial. Right. Of course, yes, 100%. But that's the reason I think there was so much pushback because it was coming from different directions. Literally the emails I was getting, the communication I was getting. On the one hand, people thought, oh my gosh, what are you doing? This is not true. There's, you know, police are out there murdering innocent black people. And on the other hand, I had police telling me, what are you talking about? We're not biased, right? And so, and in fact, Right. When we published this in the New York Times, the folks that were interviewing at the time, they were more concerned with calling NYPD biased than they were saying that shootings were unbiased at the time. Very, very different now. But at the time, that's where the nervousness was coming from when they published it. The world has changed.

The world has changed. He's apparently remained the same. I'm consistent. How much do you think the reaction to your report and the fallout and the general narratives are to do with history, the way that the police has behaved in the past, if we think about things like Rodney King, for instance, and all of those types of incidents? It has a lot to do with it. Again, the relationship between black communities and the police are broken in most communities. And that's why I believe, just like you just described, working together on these lower

level uses a force, when the stakes are lower, that is the place to really have reform, right? It's hard when you, when the police go to a scene, there's weapons involved, and you say, well, now is the time to compromise. No, I'm not sure. Okay. And so, yeah, that's the, you know, that, that, that is the source. And so there have been years and years, decades of, of, of, contentious relationships between black people and the police. So, you know, look, if you go to the black neighborhood, has none of this surprised anybody. And it's just come into the mainstream

in the last few years. But this has been boiling over for a while. And again, the frustrating part to me is, if we can all look clear-eyed at the data, there are positive things we can do for change, right? These are not marks on a chalkboard. This isn't academic research anymore. That's done.

The question is, how are we going to work together to actually create better relationships between communities and police in a way that's productive, in a way that we can actually talk through some of the difficult issues. It seems like the challenge there, from what I understand, is there's a kind of mutual bias going on because from somebody who's a civilian, as you say, the perspective is they're being mistreated because of the skin color and so on. And from the police perspective, from people I've spoken to as well, there's the thing they'll say is, well, different groups of people commit crimes at different rates. So if I'm a black police officer, white, it doesn't really matter.

If I turn up to the scene of a crime and half the time it's a black perpetrator, that's going to build in certain narratives in my head. So next time I pull someone over and they are black, how am I not going to be a little bit more wary of that? And then you've got that mutual bias kicking in. People are mutually suspicious of each other. How does I get untangled? Well, I think we've got to look for better clues than just black or white. Right. I mean, when I was in college, they used to, we used to call it the usual suspects.

Like some crime would be committed and they say, well, the suspect is between 5-8 and 610. He's 150 and 300 pounds. Black male, black hair and brown eyes. And we're like, shit, none of us can go outside, right? And so we need to do better than that. I joked with Loretta Lynch once that, that we need to have, is there something,

can we have TSA pre? Is there something I can do that when the police pull me over, they can look beyond just race, right? Maybe if I wear salmon colored pants, I mean, that's something that not a lot of criminals do. Right. I don't want to do it either. Might be worth being roughed up.

But you get the idea, we have to figure out other context clues beyond that, right? But you're right, police are rationally responding, to what they view as threats, right? When I embedded myself in the Houston Police Department, I noticed that independent of the skin color, the police officer was really scared when he pulled someone over.

I asked him why. He says, man, this is Texas. We assume everyone's got a gun. Yeah. Right? And so all of these layers of complexity are here. I just wanted to be several layers deeper than just saying, look at that person of their race.

And, you know, it's the other extreme also frustrates a lot of us. Have you ever been in a TSA pre-line where they're patting down the 90-year-old? You're like, I don't know. Could we get this line moving, right? We start to stereotype from the other direction. So I just think we need better ways of understanding who's a threat and who's not. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money.

because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. And so you presented your findings, you presented your paper. What happened then at that point?

You know, in the beginning, I thought all this is going really well. I did. I'm not sure I ever admitted it. I really thought. I said, this is like, I really, I really crushed this one. I hit the spot right. We hit the spot, right? Because, you know, we have this place in economics where we put our working papers and one of the people that worked there sent me a note in the first weekend it was published and says,

man, you just broke all the download records, you know. This paper's hot. And it was in the New York Times and an upshot or what have you. My emails were exploding. President Obama at the time invited me to the White House for a very long meeting about police use of force. And I thought, I am making a difference. But as the narrative started to change over time, and yes, there was, let me back up, yes,

there were threats of physical violence and we had police protection and all that. stuff and that was not good, but I was focused on all the good things I thought could come out of this. But over time, it has become something where, I don't know, it's people have used it to kind of, not just write me off, but write off research in this way, kind of writ large, and that has been very surprising. You know, it has contributed to, I think, other social scientists being less willing to follow the facts wherever they leave. And I think that is really, if I'm right about that, and I hope I'm not, actually, that's really, really bad. For sure. You know, I've got students that,

you know, I meet with at Harvard Square say things like, I can't say this in public. And I'm like, who are you? Like, this is just you and I over a cup of coffee. And people have become so leery of it. And the way that the paper has been covered by both sides, right? Both sides. I saw once or read once that people were saying football players shouldn't kneel at the national anthem because my paper demonstrates they shouldn't kneel. I thought, my paper has nothing to say about whether or not they kneel at the national anthem or not. And on the other hand, I've seen researchers find the exact same results, but bury them, either bury them in appendix tables or refuse to publish at all. And so it has been really quite chaotic since then. I would say that, again, the first

month or two, I thought, wow, this is great. I can't wait to do the next thing. But my life really got turned upside down because of it. And one last thing. I know I'm rambling, but I want take a time. Take your time. And I want, the most important thing is I'd do it all over again. A hundred percent. And almost in the exact same way. not because I didn't make any mistakes along the way and all that, but because I just refuse to lie to people, especially the constituents that I've been working for my entire life. I've been doing this for 21 years, 80 plus hours a week. It's hard enough empirically to figure out what the truth is.

I'm not going to constrain myself for only those truths that. that are in a nice box with a particular bow. Can't do that. This is after we're trying to solve problems, right? And yes, my life was turned upside down. Who cares, right? This is about whether or not we can actually get police to change and actually get folks in the neighborhood to understand

that, yes, there are some issues, but, you know, the biggest threat in the world is not their police officers. And can we come together to make the country better as it comes, as regards public safety? For me, that's what this is about. So who cares what happened to me? You know, if I discover a result like this tomorrow, I'm going to put it out in the same exact way. And if I suffer the same consequences, so be it.

I respect that and I get that. The question I was going to ask you is you mentioned the narrative changing. I can't imagine what it's like. You do a paper. You get called in by the point. president for a lengthy conversation about your research. And then, quote, unquote, the narrative changes. Like, I don't even know what that means.

Like, who changed it? I don't know. I don't know who gets to change narratives. It is what, it is mind bending. Truly, right? I can imagine. Well, maybe I can't. A few years ago, you weren't allowed to say a joke on campus.

And now you can call for the genocide of whole populations and that's free speech. So exactly, progress. And let me guess you were there all along. Yeah, I was consistent. So I don't know who gets to, I don't know who decides that. But who was coming? I guess part of what I'm asking is who was coming after you? Was it black people in the neighborhood who were saying your research is not sufficiently

reflective of our reality? Was it why academics who were? were like, this is a toxic subject, you've got the wrong conclusions. Was it the media? Was it all of those at once? Like, I get, I'm genuinely asking, like, who gets to change the narrative from you're sitting in the White House to suddenly you're some kind of demon monkey? D, all the above. Okay. It was, but I'd put the least amount of emphasis on people in the communities. Okay. You know, I think people in the communities had questions and and, you know, civil rights folks in the communities had questions,

which ranged from, are you sure that Houston's representative of this or that, which is a fair question? Totally. Bring that all day long. Totally. To, did you have to put it out here? We had them on the ropes, brother. You know.

I'm not gonna say who that was. But I was like, my bad, I didn't know you had them on the ropes. I did. To, you know, academics who, who, you know, Yeah, this is, you know, the paper was labeled hate speech on Twitter at the time. Right? I'm not on social media, but someone posted it and the account was suspended for hate speech, right? That's ridiculous.

That's ridiculous to other academics who are out lying saying, oh, he's retracted those results. They aren't true. Silliness, right? to police officers who, some of which you say, yes, you may have a point here to, no, I don't think there's any bias and lower level uses of force. So again, there was something there for everyone not to like. So maybe it's true then if it ended up pissing off everyone. So I don't know your question of who gets to change the narrative, but I will say that different

people had different angles on these results, yes. Sure. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that seems to me like an extraordinary thing to happen where you go from being celebrated for this study all the way up to the White House to then people, something must have happened in the social consciousness around that time for people to just see this issue differently, including one of the things that strikes me about it is like, why would people be upset about information that's helpful to taking the conversation forward. Like, that to me is very strange. Do you know what I mean?

No, I do know what you mean. And I've asked people I respect something similar, not quite as elegant as you just did. But what their view is, is, look, if you've got your mind made up that the police are really discriminatory, then this is just annoying to you, right? That because the paper's not perfect, right? I don't have every police department.

I don't know if Chicago's police department is discriminatory in shootings versus not. I don't have Chicago's data. I'd love to. I don't know what's going on in a lot of police departments, and the data is not perfect. And so in their view, I've put something out there irresponsibly that shows something that they just know can't be true. And so it's inconvenient for them. Instead of saying, huh, how can we work together to collect more data? This is the best evidence we have.

Let's collect more data. Let's see if it's real robust. That's how social science typically makes progress. But in this case, it's such a hot topic, or at least has been, that people are just jumping to conclusions and taking sides. It's become much more tribal than social scientific. And I'm not equipped for that. That's not what I do for a living.

I don't join tribes, unless the nerds have one. one. But you get the idea. So I don't, that's what they're upset about. I believe, though I don't know. It's about narratives, isn't it? Every tribe, would they have their narrative? If you are, for one of a better term, conservative, pro-police, you have this narrative. If you are liberal, progressive, you have this narrative. And when someone who comes along, not only challenges your narrative, but also provides evidence, which is very strong, borderline irrefutable, then you face with two options, really. You either change the narrative, which is incredibly painful,

because that means that you get isolated from your tribe, or you defend your tribe, which means you go on the attack. Yeah, and you discredit the person or the study or what have you. And I think part of that's it. This is a, there is a political game going on, or a political fight going on, or a culture war, whatever you want to call it. And frankly, for both sides, this was a little inconsistent.

convenient. Right. And but I thought that's what tenure was for. I thought that's what we were supposed to be doing. I'm pretty thrilled by the idea that you can get data, you can do the analysis to your best of your ability, and you can actually be relevant, right? Many of my economist's friends are working on the optimal cake eating problem. That's not what this is.

So for me, it was a real, truly, a real opportunity to actually feel like you were really relevant in a discussion that was important. I've never written a paper that spoke to one of the exact points that people were protesting in that moment. Usually academics are like, oh, something happened in the world. Seven years later, I got it. The world has moved on, and it becomes part of history. This, I got really lucky, I believe, that this paper was relevant in that moment, unfortunately, and continues to be relevant. But I was not expecting, because I had not seen that, I had not had that experience before. I was not expecting what would come. It's also, and maybe this is me projecting a little bit and push back if you feel this is

incorrect. I imagine it put a few noises out of joint with fellow academics, you know, because a lot of them toil away, they produce their papers, they don't get, you know, they're not shared a lot, they're not talked about a lot. And then they're they move on to the next one. Here you have this young guy who comes in, produces this paper, gets to meet with the president, breaks the download records, and all of a sudden they're going, him, why him? Why not me? Was that part of it, do you think? Yeah, that's interesting. I haven't thought much about that it could be. And I'd also add to that, that I don't, I don't carry myself as the typical Harvard. Maybe I do now. This sweater looks pretty typical. I mean, your shirt,

is my wife probably but in all seriousness when I was younger in my career I'd wear jerseys to class

and you know I was just being myself right and so and you know I'm a video game fictionado so I had a video game console

in my office things like that that I think you know they might have not been not just saying I can't believe that but that guy

like the guy who's playing video games during the day so some of That could have been it. There's, you know, it's no secret. There's a lot of jealousy in the academy. But I think it was, it was more than that. I think it was, um, that people wanted to be seen as being on the right side of this issue, back to the tribes. I mean, my own department put out a statement about police use of force that was completely opposite, what the paper actually showed.

Right. That was one of the hardest things to see. I was like, it's right here. I'm in the same department and their statements started off. We know how much bias and race and discriminated. I'm like, that's not exactly what we found. So not even my own department could be subtle in that way. So I think people were running scared. There was a sense of, are you with the good guys or the not? And so you couldn't in 2017 or 18 in an Ivy League University stand up and say, I don't know. Seems complicated. Let's take a look at the It was, nope, clearly it's biased. We've seen the videos. We've seen all, you know, 12, 15, 20 of them, whatever the number is. We've seen them and that's bias. And that's the, I felt like that was the knee-jerk reaction that was happening. I think the other disappointing thing that happened, in my opinion, was that the standards of evidence start to change when you don't like the result. And so there were people I really respected their methods, their analysis over the years, followed their work for literally more than the a decade who said things like, well, I don't like this, I don't like the way you've done this paper.

And I was like, it's the same as you do, right? So what has changed? And so this cherry picking of what's good and what's bad, not based on the fundamentals, but based on the output, that is, that's the part that's most concerning to me. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, exactly what you're saying. What you're talking about is you're someone who's interested in pursuing the truth, who found himself in a politicized environment, which this will sound perhaps like a

strange comparison, but as someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, that's exactly the environment that people operated under, where there was certain things, certain errors. If you research physics, physics was non-political until it became political for whatever reason, and suddenly your physics paper would be politicized. People would have opinions about it, and they would criticize it, not on the merits, but because it was the tribal thing at that particular moment and time to do. So I guess the question I wanted to ask you, we've had obviously lots of academics on the show,

and anyone looking from the outside into what we see as the manifestations of the academic environment now, people have questions. And the pursuit of truth seems to be definitely, from an outsider's perspective, one of the things that's really taken a beating in recent years, on campuses around the world, actually the Western world. Would you agree with that? Do you think that's true? Certainly on the, on

you know, social topics and sensitive subjects. You know, I don't, I don't have a sense that the math guys are doing functional theory any differently than they were before. But I do believe that, you know, research into genetics, research into, um, uh, gender identity or other identity. Research into the police and education. I think those things have been heavily skewed. Yes, I do believe that. And it's exactly as you described. I really, you know, I showed up at Harvard at age, I don't know,

maybe I was 26 or something, 25. And the job I had before that was like McDonald's, I mean, I don't know anything better. I really believed that, I mean, we sit in these seminars once a week, twice a week. and someone presents something, and it's just crushing them about exactly how you do economics. Let's get to the fundamentals of whether this paper is correct or not. I love that process because it didn't really matter what the subject was.

The question is, is this a valid research design or not? And those things get spirited. And I did the last three years of my PhD at the University of Chicago, which is where they do it really in a spirited way. I mean, this is like, it was a full contact sport. I love the place. I really love the place. I've given seminars there that have spoiled it into the middle of the night.

And so I fundamentally believed that. And so it literally changed my whole worldview. Because I thought, oh, crap, they were playing a different, we're playing different games here. Right? And I didn't know that. And obviously it doesn't apply everywhere. There's really, really great academics everywhere in every place.

But I have been surprised because when I came to Harvard as a postdoc, I went to the Harvard Society Fellows. Academics, I viewed academics as the place where smart, quirky people went because they had no political skills. And so they weren't going to go to corporations because those were too political. But in a department, it was really about meritocracy and how smart you were and the best ideas would rise at the time. I just don't think that's true anymore. I think that we're selecting for people who are much more political and much more sophisticated on that dimension because the universities are, you know, to be successful. If you're a young scholar, I do believe political, sophisticated. education savvy are very important.

Just on that point, not to personalize this too much, Roland, but one of the people involved in the campaign against you was, I nearly said, the late Claudine Gay. And it seems to me without, you know, taking a particularly strong stance either way on it, that just that her recent departure kind of symbolized a lot of the simmerings of the stuff that we've been talking about. Now, I know you probably feel quite strongly on a personal level about her, but what did you make of that whole saga, including in relation to you, but also just in terms of where we are in the way that people are appointed to positions within academia, people are promoted within academia, people are required to have certain opinions, people are treated differently depending on their background and ethnic background, etc. I found that whole situation pretty sad. It was just not a good day for higher ed, for Harvard, or wasn't a day, weeks and weeks.

And so I just thought that particularly because much of the discussion was about her own scholarship, which I know nothing about it. I've never read a paper by Claudine Gay. But that people seemingly around the world were questioning the quality of that. at an institution like Harvard was really hard, you know. That was just really sad. So my personal involvement with the administration aside, it's just, you know, hard to watch every single day people questioning the integrity,

the academic rigor of the person who is supposed to be leading, university. And when you say it's hard, just to be clear, you mean because it possibly is the case? Or do you mean because it's just kind of affects the reputation of Harvard? Or why is it said? Both because, you know, this is what we're there for, rigor. And, you know, I am a, I don't know a about university administration. I just don't clearly. But, you know, I came to the university when Larry Summers was president. And I'll never forget, this is not dodging your question. This is giving context for your question. I got a call when I was a fourth-year graduate student. And I never had a call

like this. Maybe you're a fancy guy. Maybe you've had one. You pick up the phone, hello, hold for the president of Harvard University. Okay. And so Larry gets on the phone, we start talking. And he tells me, if you come to Harvard, because I had offers at other places, we'll go to lunch once a month and we'll talk about your research. What? That would be unthinkable. I just couldn't imagine a university president doing that.

Okay, so he does it. I don't believe him, but he says it. So I get off, I choose Harvard, go there. Within four weeks, I get the call again. I'd like to schedule lunch with you and the president. Okay. So I go and we go to lunch and I had just written a paper about how black students who go to historical black colleges may pay a wage price.

And I was calling the paper at that time, the price of identity. Okay. So he calls me in because he wants to discuss that paper and I go, uh-oh, I must be in trouble. and he starts eating and he gets so excited about the research that he's talking while he's eating and his food is splattering all over him. And in that moment, it's the first time I ever really felt comfortable at Harvard. I thought, if this guy can be president, he's a mess. If he can be president, then there's a chance because in that moment, it felt all about ideas.

Right. Yeah. Right. He was sloppily eating. I probably was using the wrong fork, but we were talking about statistical identification. in a particular paper that he thought was interesting. And so that's what I pride myself of in administration. I want someone who's been through it to help guide you through.

It would have been nice to have Larry in 2016 when I was navigating this stuff with Washington and with the paper to provide guidance, right? My budget, make sure I'm not. That's silly. Anyone can do that. So I, I, the reason it was hard is because my preference, And the way I started at Harvard was to have a scholar, a true scholar president.

And again, I don't know about former president gay scholars. I've never written a paper. Maybe they're phenomenal. I don't know. But to see the media attacking them those papers and questioning scholarship and questioning what it meant to be at Harvard University as someone who's been there for 20 years, that part was hard. Sure.

Understand. The experience you described sounds like the way university shows. should operate, the pursuit of truth, the discovery. I'm going to sound like a wide-eyed romantic here, but that's kind of what I thought academia was for. That's what I do. Me too. I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month,

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because the old measures of segregation have been around for decades and decades, but could we use our new understanding of network theory to find a kind of network-based model of segregation, right? It will sound weird, but it's the truth. I was flying into Chicago, and if you fly into Chicago at night, the whole city is massive, but it looks like this grid. And the lights kind of make the edges of that grid. You can kind of see a matrix. And I looked out the window in the plane, and I thought, geez, that's how we should think about segregation. Because I knew Chicago, and I knew basically the black people lived in this part of the grid, the Polish people. It's okay. And so I eventually wrote that paper.

and then gave it in one of the flagship seminars that Gary Becker ran at Chicago. Gary Becker's got a Nobel Prize. He was a phenomenal phenomenal, one of my just absolute heroes in the profession. And that seminar went for an hour and a half. Then it spilled over to the Q Club where I'm sitting there with multiple Nobel Prize winners

around the table and assistant professors and other people and me as an assistant professor. or a postdoc, and I just have this image in my head of literally Gary Becker, this famous economist with the chicken wing hanging out of his mouth and pointing to a piece of a napkin where he was going to scribble some notes while eating the chicken wing about this paper. That's, we can both romanticize, but those are the ways I grew up in academia. So to now have it be a question of, can we say that? Can we say this?

Can we do that? We're not the world's spokespeople. spokespeople, right? In the same way comedians aren't political ambassadors. I mean, something they are, Rodden. They're going to be honest with you. But we are supposed to be the ground bearers of truth and then let everyone else figure out the politics. We are supposed to just inject truth into the world. Maybe that's naive, maybe I'm stupid, et cetera, but that is the way I grew up. That's what Glenn Lowry and Gary Becker and some of the greats. That's what they taught me. And we We're way, way, way different from that.

Roland, you know, when you were talking about getting your research published, breaking download records, et cetera, et cetera, my thought to myself is, in a post-George Floyd world, there's parmy that thinks you wouldn't even get published now. I think there would be some academic institutions, maybe not all of them, but certainly some of them were like, we can't publish this. Yeah. What are you trying to do? Yeah. You might be right. One of the projects I'm working on right now is to understand academic freedom. So I have, I'm looking into all the published papers in the last two decades. And I'm using AI to help me understand the political slant of the results. Would these results be considered centrist or conservative or liberal? And what I'm showing, I'm not sure I'm righteous yet, but the,

preliminary results are showing are exactly what you just described, which are, there are far fewer published results that are both center and right after leading up to and after 2020. Now, the question is, is it because the journals are not publishing them, which is what's your inclination or people aren't writing them? I can't tell the difference. Maybe progressivism is just true. There was a paper. You know, there was an article about that in the...

in the Harvard student newspaper. They said, what do we need diversity for of thought when progressivism is just the right? It's just true. I don't know. What research. We know the answer to everything. Exactly. Precisely. And that is terrifying because they, as is most commonly said, as is said all the time, the greatest form of censorship is self-censorship. So if you've got this idea and you think, this could be a dynamite paper and then go, but I can't write it because it won't get past. I've got the wrong results. Yeah, because it will get the wrong results. Or what you most likely think is self-preservation.

What is this going to expose me to? Because not everybody's like you temperamentally. Then what we've got is essentially a system that isn't fit for purpose. 100%. And you're going to be making policies based on the research that comes out, which is only going to be one way because no one wanted to show the other. So that's fundamentally what I'm losing sleep at night about. That's exactly it.

So I guess the question is, what do we do about this? How can we challenge this? How can we make a better academy? Well, I don't know the answer to that. It's very difficult because you have to, I used to think, well, let's have grant money for controversy. commercial ideas. That's not going to work. Because unless people can get tenure and raise amongst the ranks in their profession by doing what they know is right. And I'm skeptical that we can

change that part. Unless you change that overall set of incentives, well, you know, all the rest of the stuff is window dressing. That makes sense to me. So until you make truth seeking a high status thing to do within academia, you can't win. You can't win. But that's the the purpose of academia? So how, how do, I mean, there's got to be a way to make it, to coin a phrase, to make academia great again. But there's got to be a way, right? I'm trying, I'm trying to think of the air. It's not MAGA. Yeah, I think, you know, all it takes is a couple of universities to show us the way. Okay. So I think, you know, obviously that's what University of Austin is trying to do. You know, there are universities like University of Chicago,

who has tried to keep it that way. There's, I just talked to the general counsel of a couple of other universities who asked me the exact same question, how do we do this? And the issue is, even if you do it within your own university, if that person doesn't get tenure there, they fall potentially.

You know, imagine I had a research program that said, you know what? A lot of people have been looking into government programs as a way of helping black Americans, I'm going to look into how families can do a better job. I'm not saying that's a good idea or not, but just imagine someone said that. And they decided, it went on a very rigorous research course

over five or eight years on that side of the equation. And even if their university supported that and said, this is great, but it just is beneath the line, where are you going to go if that doesn't work out? Right? There might be a much steeper fall because other universities might not like that line of inquiry. If that's true, again, the incentives for a person to do that are very small. And so what am I saying with all this?

You not only need to have to fix one university or two, you have to fix a lot. There's got to be a way. There needs to be a way of saying if the research design and the methods or the methods or rigorous enough, we don't care what the answer actually is. If the data are high quality and the research design is solid, we don't care if the solution points right or left are in the middle. And if there were a way to provide insurance for those people, then we could solve the problem. But right now, what I am hearing from young scholars, from graduate students, is that they are scared to do these things, right? I've had people literally ask me, what do you do when you

come up with something that's taboo? Right? I've got these questions, but I'm not sure I can answer them. Do you think I can? I, of course, encourage them, but I also know that there are a potential cost to this. And so we've got to find a way to provide insurance. Isn't that crazy to provide insurance for telling the truth. Roland's, yeah, it is. Truth insurance, I mean, I don't think a lot of people would give you that insurance, I'm going to be honest with you.

A lot of the companies, insurance companies. The premiums on that, baby, are going to be high. It's a new idea for Geico. There's, it seems to me when I talk to academics or we talk to academics and we interview them, they broadly fall into two camps. There's two people, there's the camp that says the academy can be saved,

There's the other camp which says the academy is beyond saving, we need to build new academies. I realize that's essentially a binary choice I'm presenting you with. Are you in one camp or another or is there a third way? I don't think you left any room for a third way. I'll tell you a third way, actually, just to add some nuance to this. So I guess what we were posing is like Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, they're building a new thing from the ground up. University of Austin, similar.

There are the people who work within institutions. I was in Grand Junction in Colorado, and they have a relatively small college there. And they don't do either. They're not like massive, obsessed with DEI or anything like that. But they're also not aggressively against any of it. They just do things their own way. Maybe that's the third way. Yeah, I consider that the first way, which is reforming the new institutions we already have.

Right? So I think there's a question of, you know, like as if this were a house, do we refurbish what we have or do we start with new construction? And, you know, maybe the market's going to tell us a little bit of both and what the optimal mix is. I don't know. My inclination is to try to refurbish what we have, although I'm very supportive of what University of Austin is doing, trying to do. And here's a, but here is a third way. The people who are doing the research, could just care less about what other people think. Every big movement, people had to have sacrifice. So either you believe in truth and you're willing to pay some personal cost,

or you don't, right? If this were, if we were arguing about, you know, some social issue, we would say, well, yes, we can have this policy or that policy, or they could just work harder, right? And so in this case, why are we letting the scholars off the hook? So maybe that's the third choice, is you can go into this realizing, maybe I won't win all the awards that I could

if I made the results seem more coherent to the day's politics. Maybe that's okay. And maybe if there's enough of those people that that becomes a new thing to actually tell the truth. Right? Someone said in the other day, I got a note saying,

I really liked your interview on XYZ. Authenticity is in. And I thought, what does that mean? Right? I can tell exactly what it means. We are in the authenticity moment. This is why new media is taken off the way it is,

because if you think about what TV is, it's a bunch of fake people having a fake conversation in the fake room. This is the exact opposite. Right? we're just talking straight. And I think this is the moment for authenticity. The flaw in your argument...

Why can't the academics be optimistic? Well, this is the floor in your argument, right? Because I agree with you 100% about people just need to man up and tell the truth and pursue the truth and do the work that they're actually supposed to do. On the other hand, you're an economist. And you know that human beings respond to incentives first and foremost. And if it's not a high status thing to do, if it's not a money-making thing to do, if it's not a blah, blah, blah.

And look at universities. I mean, I mentioned DEI. They're not even hiring or recruiting people based on merit. So if you have an institution that operates in that way, why would the people in it pursue the truth at any cost? I mean, that just, that's not reflective of how people work. Let me push back. This is fun.

Well, incentives matter, but what economists really believes is that people maximize utility. So then the question is, why isn't it that the academics care enough about pursuing the truth? right yes incentives on the margin matter here or there and yes i agree the incentives a point in the opposite direction but if you look at at some of the things that people are how wild this is where we started why are the thing who gets to change the narrative why do things swing wildly one way and wildly the other way maybe uh you called it man up i'm going to call it maybe people ought to have a north star. Sure. That maybe we've lost

that compass, that driving force that said it doesn't matter. If I find that this group is to blame for something, I'm going to say it. If I find another group is to blame for that or that's what the empirical evidence says, I'm going

to say it. Right. And then, yes, let's get the universities to back you up, to provide support for that. to a, can we go this far? Encourage that. That's what I had when I first got to Harvard. I had a president who not only said this is okay, but actually encourage the work. And so I think encouragement within the university could go a long way, but I also believe that, you know, maybe we should be selecting different people to go into the academy. Do you think is...

I love it. Is that a rap? It works for me. Francis got more and more question. One more question, which is, how much do you think this is... And I've seen it because I used to work in teaching. And people being afraid of their own students. how big of a problem is that?

Again, I don't know. And I'm not even sure people are afraid of their own students. Maybe they are. It could be that the incentives to do the right thing when it comes to grading or putting pressure on students to study for this or that are just not there. and you know earlier in my career I was a hardliner on I said the papers would do at 5 o'clock 501 I don't take them

and I didn't say you had to turn it in five you could turn it in three weeks ago if you wanted to but 5 o'clock is the deadline I'm softer on that now not because I'm scared of the students, but because it's 503. Do I want the headache that this is going to cause? Right? Because the incentives are very different.

So I think distinguishing between those two is really important. I don't, you know, I think that I think we actually, oftentimes can bend over backwards so much that you actually do the students of disservice. Let me give you a tiny, tiny example that means nothing. You teach a course and you say, hey, you should read Gary Becker's dissertation on the

economics of discrimination published in 1957. See you next class. Professor, could you provide a link to that? Could you send us around a link? No, just go find it. But that we are, they're used to, students are now becoming used to a level of customer service that is such that, you know, everything is just really laid out for them, very, very, very carefully. And it's more like problems that's solving than deep thinking. You have a paper.

How exactly how many words should it be? What exactly should? It's like, why don't you decide those, the answers to those questions? So I, you know, part of the reason I don't provide links for papers is not because I'm being lazy, but because when I was a student, when you went to search for the paper, you actually found three or four more around there were actually interesting and I pulled those off the shelf too. And so I actually think by not providing every single thing they need for their customer service needs, you actually provide, sometimes can provide a better education. Roland, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on.

We're going to ask you a bunch of questions from our supporters in a second, but we always wrap up with the same question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think we should be? I think that for me, that question boils down to, we basically know there are three or five things. that could fundamentally change racial inequality in America. We know it.

We know what to do, not to solve or other, but fundamentally change racial inequality. Why don't we have the political courage to do it? What other things? Education's huge, number one. So when I did some work on mobility, trying to understand, you have a set of people who were born into poverty,

some got out, some didn't, what are the differences between them? Number one, resoundingly, education. So we know how to create better schools for kids. We've got exemplars all over the country, and yet politics gets in the way of making those reforms. That'd be number one. Why? Why do we let that happen as a country, right? We've got places in our country like, you know, T.C. public schools where less than 10% of kids are black kids are proficient and read it in math.

And we just go on like nothing happens. We're talking about other stuff. And so for me, and we fundamentally know how that's impacting their mobility. And it is extraordinarily

frustrating to be in a social scientist's shoes and to see, hey, we actually know some things that fundamentally, I'm not talking about the margin, fundamentally make their lives better. And yet, the adults can't get their shit together to help the kids that they say they care so much about. So as a society, why do we continue to let that happen? Roland, what are the things in that particular?

I want to go into the other things, but on education, what are the simple, maybe not simple, but the obvious answers to dealing with that issue? At a high level, you know, I'm going to show you where we got it from now to exactly what they are. So we took a couple of years and went and, you know, charter schools on average are no better than public schools in America. But there's some that are amazing and there's some that are pretty awful. Okay. Okay.

And so what we did was we went in and tried to understand what makes them good and what makes them awful, right? And what we found were that there were five factors that explained 50% of the variance and what makes some schools great and other schools not so great. And those five factors are the amount of time you spend in school, right? So that's one factor. I call it the basic physics of education. If you're behind and they're ahead, you need to put in more time or ask them, please stop working so hard. Number two was how schools use data to drive instruction.

So, you know, when I got started, data was a real asset in schools. Now it's almost like a liability. There's so much of it. No one knows how to process. What do you do? The schools that are effective, when they see that their students, they take assessments throughout the year,

when they see the students aren't getting what they're supposed to in classes, they regroup, they figure it out, they come up with a different strategy, and they go back to work. So data-driven instruction. The third is small group tutoring. It is high-doseage tutoring.

If you had to do one thing in education, in my opinion, it would be high-doseage tutoring. You can get incredible gains when you got a kid around a half moon table, two kids, one tutor, and with very direct instruction. The fourth is human capital. Who are the teachers teaching them and how often you give them feedback? So the bad schools give you feedback once a year. They come in in the spring.

You don't teach very well. Most of the kids fail and they say, see you again in the fall. Schools that are very effective, very often, small bits of feedback to ensure that. sure that teachers have the support they need to get better. And the last one is very, very important to me. All of them are important, but this one that speaks to me personally, is cultured expectations. Probably one of the most eloquent political statements I've heard in my lifetime was the soft bigotry of low expectations. And I believe, and the data supported, that kids live up or down to your expectations. Like the schools that are effective, understand that if you go into an inner city

you're dealing with, you know, very high rates of single female headed households, poverty, et cetera. They don't use that as an excuse not to educate them. They use that as a way, as an excuse to be more efficient inside the school day to say, hey, we only have seven hours with this kid. We got to make up for single female headed household, poverty, et cetera. So we need to get to work. We need to use data smartly. I need to be able to give you feedback are you're teaching, et cetera. So those five factors. We took those.

We put them in a randomized experiment in Houston, Texas, in regular old public schools. And we showed that in three years, you could close the racial achievement gap in man. And five years, you could do it in reading. So you can do this stuff. And this is just a little old nerdy me. This is not, you know,

these phenomenal superstars like Jeff Gierrez, who runs the home children zone here in New York. Of course, he's amazing. But he's done the same thing. So you can do this at scale. We've done it in Colorado, we've done it in Houston, we've done it in other places. And so it's very frustrating that even just in the simple slice of education, we don't see policy going towards the things that we know actually can be effective. And so the answer to your question for me is, how can we as a society both sit around and lament the lack of progress?

and also not be willing to do whatever it takes to solve these things in our generation. Okay. I want to dig more, though, even though it's the last question. You said education. There's others, though, right? Sure. We need to really figure out how do we increase the non-cognitive skills like resilience and grit and those things. Really, those were the, in my mobility thing, those were the next ones. We also have a sense. sense of, you know, how to do health care in a more efficient and better way. I mean, I'll come back on the show. Health care is a whole different topic.

But you get the point. Healthcare, criminal justice, education, and, you know, non-cognitive skills, which is included in education, we have, the social science is not perfect by any means. But we know enough to make fundamental progress, and we just can't get past ourselves. And that is extremely, extremely frustrating. Well, Roland, we would be delighted to have you back on to talk about some of those things next time. But for now, follow us over to locals where we continue the conversation with your questions. Do you think the narrative of systemic racism towards African Americans by governments and law enforcement ever can ever be changed?

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