William Alexander Darity Jr.

William Alexander Darity Jr. works on stratification economics, reparations for Black American descendants of US slavery, equity-enhancing social policies, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, and the social-psychological effects of exposure to unemployment.

William has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (2015–2016), a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2011–2012) at Stanford University, a fellow at the National Humanities Center (1989–1990) and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors (1984). In 2012, he received the National Economic Association’s Samuel Z. Westerfield Award, the organization’s highest honor. In 2017, Politico named William to the Politico 50 list of the most influential policy thinkers over the course of the past year, and he also was honored by the Center for Global Policy Solutions with an award recognizing his work in the development of the effort to study and reverse racial wealth disparities in the United States.

William holds a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has published or edited 13 books and more than 300 articles in professional journals. His most recent book is From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (2020), authored with A. Kirsten Mullen.