When people criticize the field of economics for its failures around issues of race, the most common critique is the extent to which whites dominate the profession. It’s an important point and surely one reason why economics has done far too little to address racial gaps.

But there is also a foundational flaw in the basic structure of the discipline as it relates to racial economic justice: the assumption that markets settle into equilibrium. That’s a technical term, but broadly speaking, it’s the assumption that outside of recessions and other “shocks” to the system, overall conditions are generally balanced in such a way that trying to change them would do more harm than good.

The concept of “equilibrium” leads economists to generally assume full employment in the labor market, compensation that broadly represents workers’ value added, ample competition within product markets, price signals that “clear markets” by balancing supply and demand, and broadly balanced trade. For many economists — the more realistic ones — achieving these states often requires some prodding by the government. For more conservative economists, any such prodding invariably backfires, as it thwarts the alleged equilibrating mechanism: Rational behavior of profit-maximizing economic agents interacting with private commerce and clear price signals.

It is impossible, however, to observe the empirical record of black economic outcomes and not conclude that market failure is pervasive. Their equilibrium is disequilibrium. Black unemployment rates have been roughly twice that of the overall rate for as long as we have the data. Median black net worth is one-tenth that of whites. Relatedly, the Urban Institute points out that “the gap in the homeownership rate between black and white families in the US is bigger today than it was when it was legal to refuse to sell someone a home because of the color of their skin.” Black child poverty is 30 percent, compared to 9 percent for white children. Black people own just 2 percent of businesses, and those businesses claim 0.3 percent of revenue. In real time, we’re seeing black business hit disproportionately hard by the recession, and the owners are among the least likely to receive government support.

The empirical record thus reveals not just the substantive vacuity of the core economic assumption, but an even deeper analytic mistake. When economists assume that what we’re seeing in normal times is an acceptable baseline, worthy of maintenance by economic policy, we are accepting a set of persistently unjust outcomes along racial lines. The current model embodies and implicitly accepts all the above disparities (and many more, e.g., incarceration rates) as consistent with an equilibrium that the dutiful economist must strive to maintain.

Economic policy agendas that start from thi s model can only further entrench the disparities ticked through above, most commonly by under-intervening in failing markets. Clearly, economic racial justice requires a wholly different model.

Before exploring that alternative, let us consider how defenders of the status quo might react to this argument.

For one, they might argue that the theories are based on averages, and that the fact that averages have variances around them does not invalidate the theory. If the equilibrium results apply for most people (i.e., whites) most of the time, then they form a legitimate framework for economic theory and policy.

There are at least three reasons why such logic is faulty. First, the racial variance around the mean isn’t random; it’s always in the direction of worse outcomes — it is systemic. Second, black people represent 13 percent of the U.S. population, and other groups of color add many more percentage points such that demographers predict the United States will be “minority white” in a generation. A theory that leaves out shares of this magnitude is neither representative nor useful.

Third, equilibrium assumptions don’t hold nearly enough, even at the average. Based on conventional estimates of full employment, the overall job market has been slack most of the time since the 1970s. Persistently weak demand has kept inflation below the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target for years, and monetary policy has been structurally weakened by such low inflation and interest rates (the latter implying less “monetary space” to cut rates in weak economies). The government has engaged in economically large sectoral bailouts twice in the past decade. The United States has run a negative trade balance every year since 1976. Wages for median and low-wage workers have stagnated since the mid-1970s, both in real terms and especially relative to productivity.

Purveyors of the status quo also argue that the theory does apply to people of color. It’s just that because they tend to have lower levels of educational attainment, they’re less productive. In fact, they say, once we control for those differences, the theory holds that racial gaps should disappear.

Except that they don’t. Economist Valarie Wilson has shown how racial differences persist across education groups. Controlling for observable characteristics, including race and education, leaves large, unexplained residuals (i.e., racial gaps do not come anywhere close to disappearing when adding controls). In an impassioned critique of how economics has treated black/white gaps, economist William Spriggs accurately labels such biased reasoning “the assumption that African Americans are inferior until proven otherwise.” One might even go further and point out the assumption is often still maintained even after it is repeatedly proved wrong.

The only economics that can solve this problem is one that starts by rejecting any notion of equilibria. Disequilibrium prevails because of discrimination, uncertainty, the maldistribution of power, money in politics, the self-reinforcing process of wealth accumulation, the brutality of state-sanctioned institutions like the police — and national leaders, like President Trump, who invoke the cause of white supremacy.

Fortunately, various authors have offered alternative approaches. Ibram X. Kendi’s anti-racist agenda is a potent replacement as it flows from an eyes-wide-open assessment of the historical disequilibria (more plainly, racial injustices), and simply asks: What are the power, policy and institutional reforms necessary to repair the damage? Janelle Jones’s “centering Black women” agenda takes a similar data-driven approach and has the particularly attractive feature of recognizing linkages between all groups falling prey to the assumptions of current model. Restitution and reparation models are similarly founded in the alternative, reality-based model.

Truly repairing the system obviously goes far beyond rejecting and replacing the economic model. Doing so is necessary, but not sufficient. Still, if we hope to expand the analysis of the economy to include the historical plight of those our system has long left out, we must thoroughly reject a model that not only ignores them, but builds the injustices they’ve long suffered into its core.