Conference Spotlights America’s Inequality Challenges

How do we tackle the inequality issues that face our nation? In the coming days, deep thinkers will convene for the Old Parkland Conference to seek alternative solutions to this serious issue. American Enterprise Institute’s Robert Doar discusses the historic event that laid the groundwork for this program and why four key leaders are coming together now to initiate this important conversation.

In just a few weeks, distinguished scholars and leaders will gather at Dallas’s Old Parkland campus to reexamine the problems of social, racial, and economic inequality in America.

This gathering will reconvene the 1980 Fairmont Conference. There, the economist Thomas Sowell brought together thinkers and leaders to explore alternative solutions to the problems of poverty and racial inequality – alternative approaches to the conventional wisdom being pushed by the popular media, leading academics, and liberal elites. 

In the decades leading up to the Fairmont conference, Black Americans had made great strides in reducing inequality and achieving prosperity. The Civil Rights movement had successfully reduced and eliminated the barriers to legal equality.

But by 1980, the social and economic progress of Black Americans had slowed, or even stalled. 

Sowell, an economist at Stanford, saw that conventional wisdom about racial inequality did not actually lead to policies that helped Black people move up. On the contrary, Black Americans suffered from what he called “the counterproductive results from noble intentions.” 

In the decades that followed Fairmont, no similar forum came into existence. But the need for it has only grown. We’ve seen successive generations of well-intentioned policymakers cling to conventional wisdom, all the while worsening those “counterproductive results,” like rising rates of non-marital births.

Finally, inspiration struck Old Parkland’s four organizers – Glenn Loury, Jason Riley, Ian Rowe, and Shelby Steele – that it was time to reconvene Fairmont. 

Leaders from a wide range of backgrounds – such as Roland Fryer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Janice Rogers Brown, and Robert Woodson – will all be speaking on panels or delivering speeches. 

Conversations will tackle topics ranging from family structure and culture, to the affirmative action debate, to advice for young civil society leaders.

All of these conversations will explore how the landscape has shifted for Black Americans since 1980 and how individual communities and public policies can help more Black people, and more people of all races, achieve the American Dream.