The Difference Principle: Inequality and Power in America: Recent Episodes
Julian Jacobs
The Difference Principle is both a newsletter and a podcast that focuses on understanding the causes and effects of inequality in America.
Pascual Restrepo is a leading scholar studying automation, technology, and inequality. Along with Daron Acemoglu, he has co-authored some of the most impactful studies that attempt to understand the relationship between technological shocks and economic inequality
Dr. Andre M. Perry is a prominent scholar and fellow at The Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. He is also a scholar-in-residence at American University and a columnist for the Hechinger Report. His work tends to focus on race, structural inequality, and education, and his work has been featured in MSNBC The New York Times, The Nation, The Washington Post, CNN among others. He is also the author of the new book “Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities”. That book focuses on the devaluation of assets in black neighborhoods and highlights findings he produced in a Brookings study and presented before Congress.
The interview focuses on race inequality, the movement to defund the police, reconciling class-based movements with race-based movements, political strategies to enact progressive legislation, and whether or not change should come in or outside the system.
Walter Scheidel is an Austrian historian who teaches ancient history at Stanford University, California. He is also the author of the book "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century". This interview discusses his findings that economic inequality only ever gets reduced by war, plague, civil unrest, or government collapse.