William E. Spriggs, a 40-year career economist who worked to eradicate racial injustice in society and his profession, died Tuesday in Reston, Virginia. He is 68 years old.
The AFL-CIO, where Dr. Spriggs was chief economist for more than a decade, announced his death. Jennifer Spriggs, his wife of 38 years, said the cause was a stroke.
One of the most prominent black economists of his generation, Dr. Spriggs served as an assistant secretary of labor in the Obama administration, and held other roles in the public sector early in his career. But he was best known for his out-of-government activism as an outspoken and oft-cited advocate for workers, especially black workers.
In addition to his role at the Washington-based AFL-CIO, he is also a professor at Howard University, where he mentored his generation of black economists while driving change in a field dominated by white men.
Duke University economist and longtime friend William A. Darity Jr. said in a telephone interview, “Bill was a man deeply committed to the idea that he was doing economics because it had a social purpose. was,” he said. “This is not a discipline that should be introduced just to play the tatami room game, but the ideas that emerge from economics should be used to design social policies that make life much better for most people. ”
Dr. Spriggs worked on issues as diverse as trade, education, minimum wages and social security. But the subject he returned most frequently and spoke most passionately was the issue of racial disparities in the labor market. He repeatedly noted that black Americans are consistently experiencing unemployment at twice the rate of whites, and argued that the issue has received too little attention among economists.
“Economists try to justify this disparity by saying it simply reflects differences in skill levels,” Dr. Spriggs wrote in a 2021 New York Times opinion piece. later dismissed that claim with these startling stats: The unemployment rate for white high school dropouts is almost always lower than the unemployment rate for blacks as a whole.
During a national race count after the death of George Floyd in 2020, Dr. Spriggs wrote: open letter He sharply criticized his fellow economists for the field’s approach to race. Not only was it a widely documented failure to recruit and retain black economists, but so was economic research.
“Modern economics has deep and painful roots that few economists acknowledge,” Dr. Spriggs writes. “The assumption remains that African-Americans are inferior until all too many economists prove otherwise.”
Biden administration officials said earlier this year they had been considering appointing Dr. Spriggs to a senior economic policy position. In the end, he stayed out of the office, urging the administration, both publicly and privately, not to undermine the government’s efforts to ensure a strong economic recovery. In recent months, he has been a vocal critic of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive efforts to curb inflation, which Dr. Spriggs warned would unfairly hurt black workers.
“Bill was a preeminent figure in his field and a pioneer in challenging the field’s fundamental assumptions about racism in the labor market, pay equity and worker empowerment,” Biden said. said in a statement on wednesday.
William Edward Spriggs was born on April 8, 1955 in Washington, D.C. to Thurman and Julienne (Henderson) Spriggs. He grew up in Virginia and Virginia. His father served as a fighter pilot in the Tuskegee Air Force during World War II and later became a professor of physics at Norfolk State University in Virginia and Howard University in Washington, both historically black colleges. became.
His mother, also a veteran, became a public school teacher in Norfolk after her son earned a college degree while he was in grade school.
“I remember studying history together,” Dr. Spriggs later recalled of his mother at the White House. blog post Written while he was at the Ministry of Labor. “She used to check out children’s books about the subject she was studying.”
Dr. Spriggs received a BA in Economics and Political Science from Williams College in Massachusetts, and graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where he received an M.A. in Economics in 1979 and a Ph.D. in 1984. During his graduate studies, he co-chaired the Graduate Teachers Union and helped rebuild it after a largely unsuccessful strike the previous year.
Dr. Spriggs stood out in Wisconsin not only because he was the only black graduate student in economics, recalled classmate Lawrence Michel, who later became director of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Year.
Dr. Michel says that even as a graduate student, Spriggs was a staunch believer in the orthodox theories his professors teach about how companies set workers’ wages—one that goes beyond discrimination and supply and demand. It is said that he was skeptical of the theory that there was no room for the power of And unlike most students, Mr. Spriggs wasn’t interested in working at a top-tier school where he could get a job. Like his father, he wanted to work in a historic black institution.
He got his wish, first teaching at North Carolina Agricultural State University in Greensboro, then Norfolk State University (where his father also worked), and then a series of jobs in the government and leftist think tanks. He returned to academia in 2005 and joined Howard. From his 2005 he served as president of the Faculty of Economics until 2009.
Survivors include his wife, whom he met in graduate school, as well as his son, William. and two sisters, Patricia Spriggs and Karen Baldwin.
Dr. Spriggs has helped shape the careers of dozens of young economists.
“If it wasn’t for Bill Spriggs, I wouldn’t be an economist today,” said Valerie Wilson, the magazine’s director. Race, Ethnicity, and Economic Programs At the Economic Policy Research Institute.
When Dr. Wilson was considering taking a leave of absence from graduate school and leaving the field entirely, one of her professors encouraged her to work for Dr. Spriggs in the National Urban League. He showed her a real-world rather than theoretical-focused approach to her research and helped her regain her passion for economics, she said. After two years in the Urban League, she told Dr. Spriggs she was going back to her graduate school.
His answer was, “This profession needs you.”
Jim Tankerslee contributed to the report.
