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Putting aside that the first phrase of this tweet is absolutely incorrect, it underscores my frustration with the ways in which mainstream economics (and economists with the biggest platforms) ignores the vital work of scholars in other disciplines and Black economists. 
1/ https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1343239628942356480
1/ https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1343239628942356480
The lived experiences of many show that accessing unemployment is anything but simple. Sociologists such as @pamela_herd and @donmoyn (for example) show the importance of administrative burdens as hurdles to accessing benefits like unemployment. These aren't always a bug, 2/
but a feature. That is, these are deliberate policy choices designed to prevent eligible folks from getting services that policymakers disagree with or want to limit. 3/ https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=HER0DwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=info:TgRmYY_w8ZYJ:scholar.google.com&ots=SgyDuTYDnB&sig=c6CEnvGQjvJzx5UZ-_x8IsspJwA#v=onepage&q&f=false
But, as with nearly every other facet of American life, administrative burdens are racialized. See their excellent recent paper with @victorerikray. I've been making my way through this to apply these concepts to my own work in reproductive care access 4/ https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/q3xb8/
but here's relevant portion from the abstract: "Racialized burdens are the experience of learning, compliance and psychological costs, which serve as tools to reinforce racial inequality; they are the handmaidens of the racialized state. To develop this concept, we examine 5/
the role of administrative burdens in the US state from the theoretical perspective of racialized organizations. This framework puts the focus on the effects of organizations on individuals, rather than using individual agency – of the client, or bureaucrat – as the starting 6/
point for analysis. Using examples from attempts to access citizenship rights – via immigration, voting and the social safety net – we show how burdens have historically been used to normalize and facilitate racially disparate outcomes from public organizations that promise 7/
fair and equal treatment." In other words, we CANNOT have a conversation about unemployment policy without having a conversation about administrative burdens and how Black and brown folks (and/or disabled folks for that matter) experience hurdles to accessing social benefits. 8/
Which brings me to the work of @WSpriggs, whose expertise needs to be front and center. His work (coauthored with Nyana Browne) shows that (NH) Black workers are far less likely to receive unemployment benefits relative to NH white and Hispanic workers. 9/ https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/01/just-13percent-of-black-people-out-of-work-get-pandemic-unemployment-benefits.html
This is again because the states that have made it hardest to access unemployment benefits are in the South--places that have disproportionately higher shares of Black residents. (Black people also have far higher unemployment rates 10/ https://www.propublica.org/article/black-workers-are-more-likely-to-be-unemployed-but-less-likely-to-get-unemployment-benefits
and longer unemployment duration spells due to discrimination and working in industries with fewer protections. As economist @gbenga_ajilore notes, these unemployment gaps are also a feature and not a bug. 11/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/news/2020/09/28/490702/persistent-black-white-unemployment-gap-built-labor-market/
On the latter point about workplace protections, see the outstanding work of legal scholars @ruqaiijah and @profmohapatra. 12/ https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200522.280105/full/
To sum: the failure of economics to incorporate interdisciplinary insights into our models and to empirically address race/racism leads to shallow and ultimately incorrect policy analyses. I urge our discipline (and scholars with larger platforms) to stop elevating the work 13/
of economists like Summers who continue to get things wrong and focus on economists (often Black economists) and other scholars outside of the discipline who continue to push for the right answers rather than relying on outdated tools and theories. End thread. 14/
