Of the 49 vice presidents in United States history, 15 have become president of the United States—and Kamala Harris could soon join their ranks. After Joe Biden relinquished his bid for reelection on Sunday, Harris has quickly consolidated her position as the Democratic Party’s likely nominee. Harris has mostly operated in the background of the Biden administration, but her policy positions, and specifically her economic platform, are now likely to earn more attention.
What sort of economics education did Harris receive at Howard University? What distinction does she draw between equality and equity? And why is Harris less popular with minority groups than one might think?
Those are a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast that we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: Harris majored in economics as an undergraduate at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C. What could we say about what she may have learned in the economics department at Howard? What sort of economic tradition does Howard University have?
Adam Tooze: When she was there, she led the Abram Harris Economics Society. And that student society at Howard derives its name from Abram Lincoln Harris Jr., who was the second African-American ever to get a Ph.D. in economics. The first was Sadie Alexander, a really legendary figure. And Harris was a key figure in the early civil rights movement in the United States. He wrote for the Nation and the New Republic. We’re talking about the early 20th century here. He was one of the people who, during the Great Depression, headed Howard’s economics department and focused its curriculum not just on then-mainstream topics, but on issues to do with labor and social justice.
More recently, the Howard department was the home of William Spriggs, who was one of the leading Black labor economists of his generation, a figure in the Obama administration, in the Department of Labor, and the chief economist of the AFL-CIO, who was a very important voice insisting on the inextricable connection in American society between racial disadvantage, class, and labor market disadvantage. They’re all intimately interconnected with each other. And this has become mainstream, at least now to the extent that the Federal Reserve, for instance, in setting interest rate policy under Jerome Powell, has openly recognized the way in which a tighter labor market disproportionately benefits Black Americans and, above all, Black men, because they suffer from discrimination, which means that they are the last into employment and the first out of employment when the Federal Reserve uses interest rates to, as we say, take the heat out of the labor market. What that effectively means and what it effectively regulates is, above all, Black men’s employment. And so, yes, the Howard department, through individual figures, has been a very influential one in changing the discourse in America about macroeconomics and race.
CA: Before Harris was vice president, she was both attorney general and senator from the state of California. What can we deduce about her relationship to antitrust issues, given all the major tech companies based in California that Harris must have been involved with. Is her record reflective of a distinct liberal economic philosophy rooted in California?
AT: Yeah, I think she’s kind of a transitional figure in this respect, in the current Democratic Party, in that she came up really at the height of the tech boom. So she was district attorney in San Francisco, and then she was running to become California’s attorney general in 2010. And that’s highly significant because 2010, 2011 is really the high point and also the last moment of the really unbroken heroism and hero worship of the tech economy in the United States. I think it’s important to realize, and it’s hard to exaggerate, I think, the importance of the Californian tech story, the smartphone, social network, internet story in that first Obama term, especially against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, which discredited one of the other great hubs of American capitalism, which had been very influential in the Clinton term, which is Wall Street. And sort of the happy, good, forward-facing, futuristic face of American capitalism at that moment was tech.
And Harris is, as far as I’m able to discern—and there’s quite a lot of reporting on this—a straight-up, main-line, big tech-identified happy Californian Democrat. That’s her kind of position. She’s very tight with [former COO Sheryl] Sandberg at Facebook. She’s got family connections to Google. She made some noises about trying to curb sex trafficking and revenge porn and this kind of thing, some of the topics of the 2010s on the platforms. But whenever the talk of regulation and legislation got serious, she would withdraw from the front line. She receives a steady stream of donations from senior Silicon Valley operatives. She’s not perhaps their most favored candidate; they like [Transportation Secretary] Pete Buttigieg even more. But nevertheless, she’s tight with them, and so to that extent, quite different from the younger generation of more radical Democrats who filled out some of the key roles in the Biden administration. I’m thinking particularly of [Commissioner] Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), who has, after all, waged, some would say a quixotic, others would say a heroic struggle against the big tech platform interests with a series of more or less successful suits that the administration and the FTC have brought.
So I think Harris belongs on the mainstream, relatively pro-business, pro-Silicon Valley side of the administration at this point. And I do think that’s a generational thing. She comes into prominence at precisely the moment before the euphoria around tech has really broken, and a much darker narrative of Silicon Valley takes hold, especially of the left wing of the Democratic Party.
CA: Harris has also taken the lead in the administration on issues related to economic opportunity for minority groups, on issues that we could say fall broadly under DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) concerns. One of the things she has insisted on in public appearances and in her own public speeches: a difference between equity and equality. What’s the genealogy of that distinction—does it emerge from economics?
AT: Yes, Harris has spoken about these issues by using this distinction, equity versus equality. There was even a video that circulated quite widely in which she tries to explain, or some voice tries to explain—I don’t really know whether it’s hers, but it’s attributed to her—this distinction. And I think the idea is intuitive at first, anyway. So equality of treatment, she claims, means that everyone gets the same treatment, regardless of where they start from, which results in highly unequal outcomes. So that’s a kind of specious, bad-faith equality talk. So a little bit like Anatole France’s famous observation that the law, in its majestic equality—I’m quoting him now—“The law in its majestic equality forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal their bread.” Right? That’s the bad-faith notion of equality, because obviously poor people might be tempted to sleep under a bridge, whereas a rich person would never really face that choice. Equitable treatment implies raising folks up so they can compete on an equal footing. So this principle is often illustrated by the nice line that equality is giving everyone a shoe, but equity is giving everyone a shoe that fits. Again, you can see the sort of powerful distinction that’s being made here, but it’s a subtle distinction.
But these analogies help I think us to understand the distinction here. The problems are how you implement it. And conservatives have ridden in on this fact that you could take Harris to basically be advocating an equality of outcomes. In other words, you would adjust the initial conditions to the point in which everyone in a certain society would achieve the same outcomes, and equity would consist in the principle of making that adjustment. I mean, I think that’s far too radical. I think the most obvious way of interpreting what Harris means on this point is really just the sort of optimistic assumption that if we eliminate the most egregious disadvantages that folks suffer in American society today, then there’s really no reason to expect that the outcomes between different ethnic or racial groups or genders would be significantly different. In other words, there’s an assumption that as soon as you level the playing field, all will be well. Or, following on from that, whatever differences would emerge once you have leveled the playing field would no longer be problematic, they would be the result then of merit. And Harris is not an egalitarian, I think. That’s a totally specious accusation to make against anyone with her kind of background and reputation or the ideology of the Democratic Party today. This is the sort of silly nonsense that the GOP circulates when it describes the Democrats as socialist. They clearly aren’t.
In terms of the genealogy, the term equity actually has its roots not in economics but in law. And I think Harris, intellectually speaking, is much less an economist than she is a lawyer. And equity refers to what emerged, and in some ways persists, as a distinctive system of individualized justice outside the strict application of usual rules. It was established originally in a separate court system, the king’s Court of Chancery, where equity norms and principles merged with standard state and federal principles in the American case. So equity provides the authority for judicially ordered flexible corrections to otherwise rigid rules. And that, I think, is also, of course, what makes harder-line liberals squeamish about this idea, that it sounds really like a license to engage in social engineering of whatever type your liberal disposition predisposes you to pursue. And that’s, I think, probably where a modern political engineer or tactician like Harris is—that’s a fair characterization of her understanding of how things ought to be managed.
CA: Obviously, the Biden administration has created various economic policies to help minority groups, Blacks and Hispanics specifically. But those groups are still, if the polls are to be believed right now, more likely to vote for [former President Donald] Trump in larger numbers, at least, than they had before, and Harris is not terribly popular with those groups. Are minority groups in the United States more economically conservative than we sometimes might think?
AT: So, I mean, I think it’s important to distinguish levels and trends here. It is true that the Democratic lock-grip over Latino, Hispanic minority, and Black minority voters in the United States is weakening, but it’s still very pronounced, especially for Black voters. There’s a huge preponderance that will favor the Democrats over the Trump-led GOP. Trump is relatively less unpopular with those groups than other GOP contenders have been, and I think it’s to do with his populism, his personality, his willingness to sort of break norms, even though his personal racial politics are, I think, by no means attractive. It also remains true that, like for like, minority voters, especially Black voters, bias heavily toward the liberal side. So if you take a panel of blue-collar workers in the United States, Black workers vote and have preferences which are more liberal. And among the most solidly liberal voting group in the United States are college-educated Black women who are solidly Democrat. So I think we shouldn’t exaggerate the drift.
But especially for Hispanic voters, the margins now are much finer than they used to be. If you look at states like California or Texas or New Mexico, you know, almost 40 percent of the people who identify as conservative in those states are Hispanic. And it’s hardly surprising, really. It is, I think, a U.S. prejudice to imagine that people who aren’t WASPs are necessarily liberal. Whereas if you spend any time in Central America or South America, of course, they have extraordinarily important historical traditions of not just conservatism, but fascism. So the idea that by virtue of being Latino in a North American society, you are necessarily liberal because you suffer racial discrimination, it’s just a fallacy. And if you look at the Latino minority in the United States today, they are disproportionately entrepreneurial. This is in part because of the discrimination they suffer in labor markets. It’s also a good avenue for making a living. If you’re an undocumented immigrant, if you’re an unauthorized migrant to the United States, self-employment is a route to keeping your head above water and earning a decent living for yourself and your family. But more than a third of new business start-ups in America in recent years have been by Hispanics. And the odds that a Latino or Hispanic person will start their own business are 3-to-1 higher than is true for the white population, for instance.
So they are an extraordinarily dynamic, entrepreneurial population. Anyone who’s ever lived in an American city knows that American cities function in large part through Hispanic and Latino entrepreneurialism at every single level. And that, in the long run, you would imagine, will predispose this group to become what we’re familiar with from Miami, for instance—you know, a very large, culturally and economically conservative business class that just happens to be Spanish-speaking and originate in Mexico or South or Central America. And it would be strange, frankly, if that development did not transpire. To that extent, it would be a kind of normalization of relations across the border between the United States and its southern neighbors.
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