Dear Subscribers, I know it’s been awhile since I’ve posted and that’s because the last two months have been packed with work and travel. But I wanted to let you all know that I’ve left my position at Brookings and am now working for the NBA. I’ve always loved basketball, but that has nothing to do with my new job, which is Research and Impact Director for the National Bankers Association. More on the organization, new role, and hopes for the months ahead to follow in the rest of this post.
But before I jump in, some items to note:
1): If you’re looking for a good literary horror novel to read during this Halloween season, I highly recommend The Only Good Indians by Native author Stephen Graham Jones - a slasher novel with more on its mind than the standard genre tropes. Here’s the description from the publisher: “[the novel] follows the lives of four American Indian men and their families, all haunted by a disturbing, deadly event that took place in their youth. Years later, they find themselves tracked by an entity bent on revenge, totally helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.”
2): In keeping with the above, if you’re looking for a spooky season movie, Halloween Ends (streaming on Peacock) provides a great ending (at least until the next reboot) of the Halloween franchise. Jamie Lee Curtis tells viewers that there are two kinds of evil - the external kind that threatens the community (Michael Meyers) and the evil we carry inside us. The movie confronts us with both kinds, set in motion by a memorable tragedy in the opening scene. The critics didn’t love this one as much as I did, but please disregard — it’s a great film precisely because of the creative risks it takes.
3): I’m a little late to the party, but I finally played Firewatch - the atmospheric, story-driven game where you solve a mystery in a Wyoming wilderness, and in which “your only emotional lifeline is the person on the other end of a handheld radio.” Firewatch is emotionally charged, fully existential, and truly unforgettable. If you’ve got a free weekend, it’s well worth playing through (and is currently available for free on Xbox Gamepass.)
More Details About My New Job
My favorite Christmas movie of all time is It’s A Wonderful Life. And I’ve often reflected that the film is also the most formative to how I think about politics and economics. In particular, each time I watch, I am struck by the contrast between George Bailey’s community-driven, mission-focused approach to lending and development and Mr. Potter’s profit-driven, community-abolishing approach to development.
George Bailey wants to serve his community, even when that runs counter to his own ambitions or financial well-being, whereas Mr. Potter is solely motivated by greed. In the end, Frank Capra wants us to see that Bailey has the more fulfilling life precisely because he is rooted in a community that loves him.
When I was explaining my new role to my parents, I mentioned It’s A Wonderful Life to explain and they immediately clicked with the mission of the job. The National Bankers Association is a 95 year old organization founded to support minority banks including Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native banks. Our banks are community-based, mission-driven institutions, several of which have inter-generational leadership just like the Baileys. These banks serve low-moderate income households and communities, providing checking and savings accounts, small business loans, mortgages, and more, in places where major banks refuse to locate because it’s less profitable.
In this post, I’ll focus on mission-driven Black banks specifically, but a lot of the insights are applicable for all minority groups that have experienced historic racial discrimination and that still face cycles of disinvestment today. At Brookings, a lot of my research focused on how to secure investment in Black neighborhoods that have experienced historic disinvestment through redlining, shrinking tax bases after both white flight and then the flight of the Black middle class, and other well-documented trends that explain much of today’s place-based disparities in communal wealth.
But my time at Brookings also made clear to me that disinvestment is an ongoing issue. Here’s how I explained current trends in a co-written blog post about land ownership and development:
Black commercial corridors and neighborhoods often fall victim to a three-step process of exploitation. First, Black places are denied opportunity to build wealth through the systemic devaluation of their existing assets, including residential property and businesses. As Black places begin to atrophy, banks and investors pull away, leading to reinforcing cycles of disinvestment which inhibit the creation or scaling up of local businesses and undermine efforts to arrest and reverse decline. Finally, once asset devaluation leads to a drop in prices, outside investors step in to cheaply buy assets and leverage their ownership into economic development schemes that benefit the investors while ultimately displacing long-term residents and hurting existing small businesses.
As a result of these three “D’s,” many Black neighborhoods face a stark choice of either undergoing economic stagnation as their devalued assets continue to decline in assigned market value or allowing outside (typically white) developers to bankroll revitalization efforts while hoping that the development doesn’t ultimately hurt them.
The dynamics of devaluation, disinvestment, and displacement lead to compounding structural problems that negatively affect outcomes for Black people. In addition to blocking opportunities for wealth-building, these patterns also make it harder for residents of Black-majority neighborhoods to access food (especially healthy food), primary care providers, hospitals, child care, and other essentials.
But on the positive side, Brookings research finds that rates of Black homeownership and small business ownership are positively correlated with longer Black life expectancy and with the kind of economic development that unleashes broad prosperity without leading to substantial displacement. This research demonstrates that financial institutions that are inclusive, and that provide credit to people who are denied credit at larger banks, provide a vital role in facilitating community-driven development from the bottom-up.
At the NBA, we are committed to helping close the racial wealth gap. Of course, we want to help individuals and families to thrive, but we want those individuals and families to thrive in concert with their communities. In other words, we believe in the power of financial institutions to help uplift whole communities, much like what we see depicted in It’s A Wonderful Life. And just as Bailey focused on communities that were particularly vulnerable - specifically, immigrant communities - the NBA focuses on rural and urban places that are outside the reach of mainstream banks and whose desperate need for capital infusion is tied to both historic and contemporary disinvestment and neglect.
In my new role as Research and Impact Director, I will be helping our member banks document and share the the incredible impact they have in the communities they serve. I’ll be writing reports and blogs that showcase new data on this sector and that amplifies the ongoing significance of these institutions. In the months to come, I will produce research about topics including digitalization, climate finance, and achieving economies of scale in rural areas, themes which I’m sure will also be topics for this newsletter in addition to whatever other topics I feel inspired to write about here.
In the meantime, I know I keep saying that I plan to write more regularly here. I’m hoping that having graduated earlier this year with my master’s degree, and having landed in a job that is well-paid, I will hopefully have more stability now than what I’ve experienced in the last three years. So here’s hoping you’ll see more of me in the weeks to come.
As always, thanks for reading!
What I Am Reading Elsewhere
Axios: Remote work may have fueled a baby boom among U.S. women: “Remote work likely contributed to a mini-baby boom in 2021 among women in the U.S. — a reversal of a years-long decline in the birth rate, according to a working paper published by three economists this week.
Nymag: There’s been a number of pieces published in recent years about the great political party swap along education lines. But this piece by Eric Levitz is the best deep-dive into possible causes.
The Atlantic: Francis Fukuyama surveys the lay of the land and concludes that the End of History thesis is still relevant: “We’ve seen frightening reversals to the progress of liberal democracy over the past 15 years, but setbacks do not mean that the underlying narrative is wrong. None of the proffered alternatives look like they’re doing any better."
Substack: Nonprofits are under-theorized, argues Samuel Hammond (Niskanen Center): “Neoliberalism is associated with privatization. But delegating services to nonprofits is no less a form of privatization, particularly if they’re paid for by the tax-sheltered surplus value of long-dead capitalists."
Substack: I'm a professional dad who "leaned out" to support my wife's career: “I think that if we want to achieve gender equality at a society level, we need a lot more women to reach the top of their professions—to become CEOs, law firm partners, members of Congress, and so forth. If these ambitious women also want to have children—and most women do—they’re going to have to do what ambitious men have always done: find partners willing to do a lot more than half the child care.