posted March 21, 2005 at 02:10 pm
A young Harvard economist named Roland Fryer Jr. wants to use economic tools to "figure out where blacks went wrong". One of his papers addresses the six-year gap in life expectancy for blacks versus whites; he aruges that saltier black slaves were selected for the ocean voyage from Africa and that salt sensitivity has lead to "higher rates of cardiovascular disease, stroke and kidney disease".
