It’s now well known that people from ethnic minorities in the UK are more likely to catch COVID-19, but the country’s latest unemployment figures confirm that minority groups are also paying the heaviest economic price for the pandemic. Ethnic minorities are more likely than white people to have lost their jobs – Black people above all. Afro-Caribbean unemployment is now over three times white unemployment, with young people the main point of difference. Every recent UK recession has played out this way, explain economists Stephen Nolan and Ken Clark, and it’s because race discrimination rises when there is less to go around. Yet government schemes like Kickstarter are doing nothing to help. Nolan and Clark argue that this is breaking the law, and sketch out a different way forward.

COVID-19 can infect anyone. But some communities in the U.S. have been hit harder because of racial disparities. Black Americans are almost three times as likely to be hospitalized and almost twice as likely to die from the disease as their white counterparts. With harsh statistics like those, it might seem Black adults would be rushing to be first in line for the coronavirus vaccine. But as a group, they’re not. Clark University’s Esther Jones describes the long history that helps explain the vaccine hesitancy among the Black population. Centuries of what she calls medical mistreatment and malfeasance add up to mistrust in the medical establishment today.