Why This Economist Wants to Give Every Poor Child $50,000
About this episode
The central question is whether wealth inequality is the defining economic problem of our time, and what would actually fix it. Economist Darrick Hamilton argues that wealth — not income — is the paramount measure of economic security and the clearest window into America's history of racial exploitation, visible in the enormous Black-white wealth gap. Because capital returns tend to outpace wage growth and the tax code subsidizes asset-holding by the already wealthy, he proposes "baby bonds": federally funded trust accounts given at birth, up to about $50,000 for the poorest children, costing roughly $100 billion federally — a birthright to capital meant to democratize economic security. The conversation weighs objections about inflation, predatory finance, and restricted accounts, examines promising early evidence from Oklahoma's SEED experiment, and debates whether baby bonds are an alternative to or a complement for reparations.