2023-07-06
19 分钟This is planet Money from NPR.
Sometimes when there is a big change taking place, a common response is, we don't know what's going to happen.
Sometimes, though, we can say, hey, we have seen this before, and something pretty similar has happened somewhere else, and we should pay attention.
Well, last week, we got one of those big, sudden societal changes.
The Supreme Court ruled against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina, saying race cannot be used as a factor in college admissions and effectively ending the practice known as affirmative action.
And so what effect will this decision have on students and schools and even the economy?
Well, for some clues, we can actually see where this has happened before.
We can look at California, which ended affirmative action in public colleges 25 years ago.
What happened there gives us a sense of what's in store for us nationwide after the Supreme Court's recent decision.
Hello, and welcome to Planet Money.
I'm Adrian Ma.
Today on the show, we're featuring two episodes from our short daily podcast, the indicator from Planet Money.
In part one, we'll talk about the potential economic effects of the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action.
And in part two, we'll talk about infrastructure, specifically, why new subways don't get built very much anymore, why it costs so much for America to build new stuff.
We'll go underground to find that answer.
And all of that is coming up after the break.
First up, affirmative action and the Supreme Court.
So the justices in two cases ruled against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, saying that affirmative action in college admissions violates the Constitution.
Zach Bleemer is an economist at Yale who studies college admissions.
And just to set the table, I asked him to start off bye.