From the hood to Harvard

WHEN Roland Fryer was a teenager, he hung out with a bad crowd. Surrounded by drug dealers and getting into fights, he used to sell counterfeit handbags to make a bit of extra cash. Asked by a friend where he would be at 30, he replied that he would probably be dead. In fact, at that age, in 2008, he became the youngest African-American to win tenure as an economics professor at Harvard. On April 24th the American Economic Association (AEA) announced that he had won this year’s John Bates Clark medal—the profession’s second-highest honour after the Nobel prize. He is its first black winner.

The Clark medal—awarded to the most promising American economist under 40—was given for Mr Fryer’s work on improving “our understanding of the sources, magnitude, and persistence of US racial inequality”. His research has sought to explain why black children do so much worse in life than their white peers—and why relatively few have, like him, overcome their rough backgrounds.