Carpe Diem, with Mark Perry

What do you do when you wake up and see the news story of how the University of North Carolina is once again violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with a scholarship that specifically excludes white students from eligibility? Your first thought is that you need to call Mark Perry, except he's already on the job! Perry, professor emeritus of economics and finance at the University of Michigan/Flint, filed a formal complaint with the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, and within a day UNC had rescinded its exclusion of whites from scholarship eligibility.

Mark Perry has made a speciality of this kind of citizen-driven civil rights enforcement (which is explicitly allowed in civil rights statutes), having filed hundreds of similar formal civil rights complaints, most of which meet with success. In this conversation we review how he took up this cottage industry, along with broader work he is doing tracking the explosive growth of "diversity, equity, and inclusion" bureaucracies in higher education.

And since Mark is an economist, we conclude with an exploration into the high inflation that erupted *unexpectedly* (except to us) after several decades of low inflation. I try out my field hypothesis of why it has happened now, to which Mark agrees.

Everyone should follow Mark's website, Carpe Diem, and also on Twitter.