A half century ago, Treasury Assistant Secretary Surrey warned that tax expenditures threatened unmonitored access to the “back door” of the US Treasury. Such withdrawals served as entitlements to the wealthy and powerful.

Among the hundred tax expenditures today, a dozen account for the majority of the drain on the Treasury as they cost over $1 trillion annually. Each is designed to target their generosity to the already affluent and thereby accelerate the concentration of wealth.

In large part due to our past federal policies that overtly targeted their benefits to White households and their posterity, White Americans are the disproportionate beneficiaries of these policies. As such, these twelve tax deductions funnel most of their benefits to White households.

Since 1989, White household wealth has increased by more than $100 trillion. Since that time, these tax expenditures have assisted White households by nearly $20 trillion in reduced tax payments. Assuming these transfers were invested and earned a modest 3 percent real rate of return, then they would total $40 trillion in 2022. Assuming the funds were deposited in an S&P 500 index fund and simply held until 2022, then they would account for nearly $60 trillion of that increase.

Sometime in 2021, the US economy became capable of making every American household a millionaire if wealth is spread equally. Of course, it is not. Indeed, it is one of the most unequally divided economies in the world. Whereas the typical Black household earns 60 percent of what Whites make, Blacks typically hold less than 10 percent of the wealth of Whites.

The tight link between wealth and race that is exhibited in the current racial wealth gap is simply the reflection of our nation’s history. From the earliest beginnings through constitutional protections of chattel slavery, disparate land policies, support of legalized segregation, and redlining, federal policies have created and cemented the link between wealth and race.

For many reasons, White Americans fail to acknowledge the yawning gulf that is the modern racial wealth gap. This failure along with the innate power that personal wealth brings creates a system that meets the requirements of Wilkerson’s caste system as well as offering a case study in stratification economics.

Chapter 4 explores wealth inequality of the basis of disability, with particular concern for disparities in wealth accumulation, access to homeownership, and discrimination in financial processes such as rental sales, mortgage lending, and housing-related insurance. Contemporary Black disability justice activists announce a broad anti-capitalist critique of wealth inequality and call for the end of public assistance programs that hold disabled people in an economic underclass through asset tests and other means. This chapter presents an intersectional research framework for improved analysis of the wealth barriers faced by Black disabled Americans. Chapter 4 concludes with recommendations for structuring a baby bonds program to guarantee nondiscriminatory implementation and targeted equality of access for Black disabled program recipients.

The introduction outlines four major tasks of this study: (1) to present evidence of disability-based intergroup economic disparity in the United States; (2) to engage the lived experiences of individuals and communities experiencing multiple simultaneous axes of oppression, including disability-based oppression; (3) to contribute to emerging understandings of the importance of intersectionality to economic research and policy; and (4) to contribute to stratification economics in applied terms through direct engagement with policy proposals for a federal jobs guarantee and federal “baby bonds” program. It provides an overview of disability and the US economy, disability and economic research methods, common models of disability, and the challenge of race/disability analogies.

The conclusion reflects on compatibilities and tensions within stratification economics, disability justice, and intersectionality. It points to additional areas of inquiry beyond the scope of this study, including state violence, sex and sexuality, climate change, built environment, voting, and reparations. In so doing it offers an outline of future work that might advance an agenda of disability justice within the work of stratification economics in the years ahead.

Chapter 5 identifies disability-based educational inequality, which occurs in teacher bias, social stigma, classroom access, disability diagnosis, and school discipline. It attends to the education policy demands of disability justice activists and identifies dis/ability critical race studies (“DisCrit”) and critical race spatial analysis (CRSA) as two emerging intersectional research methods that can contribute to the intergroup analysis of stratification economics. Chapter 5 considers proposals for a federal baby bonds program and identifies program mandates and antidiscrimination requirements that would be necessary to guarantee equitable designation of eligible funds for college and university tuition.

Economic study of inequality and stratification often disregards the lived experiences of multiply marginalized people and communities, in particular Black disabled people. Chapter 1 makes a case for a different form of economic analysis that follows the lead of Black disability justice activists working for social equality. The argument proceeds in three parts. The first section of the chapter explains stratification economics and positions disability-based inequality within contemporary accounts of intergroup economic disparity. The second section introduces disability justice and activists who use the term to mark an alternative to traditional rights-based theories of social progress. It subsequently offers a justification and theoretical framework for conducting intersectional economic research on racism, misogyny, and ableism. The third and final section outlines the necessary components of our strategy for integrating disability-based analysis into the work of stratification economics, identifying essential steps that will guide our analysis of employment, health, wealth, and education in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 2 considers the interaction of disability and other axes of discrimination and oppression in areas of the labor market, including employment status, benefits, and workplace environment. It outlines disability justice activists’ demands to increase employment access and economic stability for people with disabilities and identifies intersectional research strategies for incorporating multiple interacting statuses into economic analyses of labor market outcomes. Chapter 2 concludes with recommendations for guaranteeing equitable treatment of Black disabled people in proposals for a federal jobs guarantee, starting with the elimination of segregated facilities, trainings, and placements for disabled workers through Section 14(c) certificates.

Chapter 3 examines structural forces generating health disparities and ableist maldistributions of care in the United States, particularly for Black disabled people. It attends to Black disability justice activists’ demands for improved health policy, facilities access, and economic protections for care workers. In doing so, it elevates corrective research methods that stratification economics can embrace to better understand intersecting effects of race, disability, and gender on health outcomes. Chapter 3 considers proposals for a federal job guarantee and elevates ways that a federal health insurance program associated with it can meet the needs of Black disabled workers and their families.

Chapter 5 turns to social embeddedness, describes this in terms of two kinds of social identities people have, and explains how a world stratified by social groups produces two kinds of shortfalls in the capability development of people in disadvantaged social groups. First, a microlevel mechanism, social group stigmatization, or social identity stereotyping operates in relational social identity settings, limits stigmatized individuals’ ability to develop their capabilities, and results in what I call capability devaluations. Second, a macro-level process, sorting people over club goods and common pool goods types of social economic locations, produces social group inequalities especially by race/ethnicity and gender, limits lower ranked groups’ capability development, and results in what I call capability deficits. How these two kinds of capability shortfalls combine and reinforce a hierarchical ordering of social groups is explained using a basic complexity theory analysis from Simon. Combatting these two capability shortfalls – motivated by the goal of creating nonhierarchical, democratic societies that promote individuals’ capability development irrespective of social identity – is associated with policies to eliminate social discrimination in the case of capability devaluations and to advance social group reparations in the case of capability deficits.

African American family income is 63 percent of White family income. African American family wealth is 4–14 percent of White family wealth. African American women and men earn 84 percent and 68 percent, respectively, of the weekly wages earned by White women and men; both ratios are lower than during the mid-1970s. It is a multi-decade truism that the African American unemployment rate is twice the White unemployment rate.

Chapter 7 offers a pathway toward understanding how the Love Jones Cohort navigate wealth-related issues and outcomes, and what the implications of this might be both for themselves and for the Black middle class more generally. Chapter 7 explores previous, current, and future wealth experiences and decisions of the Cohort, and sheds light on the ways in which the members of this demographic group traverse the various stages of their life course without a partner or child. Scholars make compelling arguments for adding wealth as a fourth indicator of middle-class status, and Chapter 7 focuses on how those in the Cohort accumulate wealth, particularly in terms of decision-making related to homeownership and explores the crucial issue of intergenerational mobility and the dissemination of wealth. Chapter 7 interrogates these issues so that we can begin to fully understand the implications of the rise of the Love Jones Cohort for the future of the Black middle class.

Beyond questions of culture, other modes of explanation for the persistence of inequality in Africa have been similarly simplistic, whether they relate to the lack of (human) capital or the presence – indeed abundance and dependence – of natural capital and the resource curse (as this introduction tries to make clear). More systematic and comprehensive explanations need to be developed. Doing so must involve building new foundations, but the question is where to begin: How do we build the conceptual foundations for a new beginning and how can these be defended or reinforced against counter currents? When built, what sorts of arguments can they support? It is these questions that this chapter successively answers in three sections respectively examining the nature of the foundations that can be built for a new beginning, the aims, paradigm, and arguments of the book, and the overall planned structure of the book.