Sandy Darity, Jr.

William A. "Sandy" Darity Jr. (born April 19, 1953) is an American economist and social scientist at Howard University. Darity's research spans economic history, development economics, economic psychology, and the history of economic thought, but most of his research is devoted to group-based inequality, especially with respect to race and ethnicity. His 2005 paper in the Journal of Economics and Finance established Darity as the "founder of stratification economics." His varied research interests have also included the trans-Atlantic slave trade, African American reparations and the economics of black reparations, and social and economic policies that affect inequities by race and ethnicity.

He is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor Emeritus of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University; he is also a visiting professor at Howard University and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center. Previously he was the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of North Carolina.

Publications Darity has published more than 250 articles in professional journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the Journal of Economic Literature, The Review of Black Political Economy, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the American Sociological Review, the Journal of Socio-Economics, and the Journal of Human Resources. His research has also been featured on National Public Radio and PBS. His 2020 book "From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century," co-authored with A. Kirsten Mullen, presents a comprehensive case for reparations for descendants of enslaved people in the United States.

Stratification economics Darity coined the term "stratification economics" in 2005, establishing a subfield that insights from economics, sociology, and social psychology to explain persistent group-based economic disparities

Darity's work draws from diverse intellectual traditions, including Veblenian evolutionary economics, Du Bois's historical empiricism, and social identity theory to create a comprehensive framework for understanding group inequality. Darity's contributions synthesize these perspectives to argue that the maintenance of social hierarchies serves the material interests of dominant groups. His work emphasizes that discrimination is not merely a market imperfection but a strategic behavior that preserves advantageous positions. This theoretical foundation has economic and policy implications, as Darity argues that addressing human capital disparities alone is insufficient, and challenges neoclassical economic theories that view discrimination as irrational market behavior. Darity's economic research suggests that dominant groups rationally maintain economic hierarchies through collective action and institutional mechanisms, and that broad public interventions and identity-conscious policies are needed to disrupt entrenched patterns of stratification.

Notable studies

Discrimination in employment With Samuel Myers Jr., Darity conducted a series of studies on the statistical measurement of discrimination in labor markets. His research with Arthur Goldsmith on the psycho-emotional impact of joblessness led to a companion study demonstrating that taking into account motivation more than offset the negative impact on estimates of discrimination from inclusion of measures of Armed Forces Qualification Test Scores in the analysis. With Major Coleman and Rhonda Sharpe, Darity was a member of a team that found in a paper published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology in 2008 that white workers tend to grossly over-report their exposure to discrimination in the workplace, while black workers tend to grossly under-report their exposure to discrimination in the workplace.

Baby bonds program With economist Darrick Hamilton, Darity has proposed a federal asset building program aimed at remediating the racial wealth gap. The amount of the trust account is to be calibrated on the basis of the child's family's wealth position.

Job guarantee A long-time advocate of a federal job guarantee, in 2012, in response to the protracted economic crisis produced by the Great Recession, Darity called for establishment of the National Investment Employment Corps, assuring all U.S. citizens over the age of 18 employed work at a salary above the poverty line as well as the standard benefits package for all civil servants, including medical coverage and retirement savings. Macroeconomics (1994, co-author) Boundaries of Clan and Color: Transnational Comparisons of Inter-Group Disparity (2003, co-editor) For-Profit Universities: The Shifting Landscape of Marketized Higher Education (2017, editor) From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twentieth Century (2020, co-author) The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice (2023, co-editor)