As the project demonstrates, digging up the racially restrictive past of property deeds take a lot of sweat and tears. But the zoning changes in Minneapolis and other legislative reforms indicate that they can have an impact: Minnesota and Washington enacted laws earlier this year that allow homeowners to renounce restrictive covenants in their deeds.

That story was not unique to Minneapolis. Restrictive covenants were commonplace in American cities of the early 20th century, including New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Portland, Detroit, and just about anywhere researchers have bothered to look.

They relied on local developers and realtors to identify “hazardous” neighborhoods—a determination frequently based on race.

Before covenants appeared in 1910, Delegard said, Minneapolis was more or less integrated, with a small but evenly distributed African American population.

So far, they’ve identified roughly 30,000 properties with covenants restricting sales to minorities.

Ehrman-Solberg, a Ph.D student in the University of Minnesota’s Geography, Environment, and Society program, developed data mining software to scan the deeds and flag those with language commonly used in the covenants. After scanning roughly 3 million pages of documents, the software flagged roughly 32,000 deeds that were then checked by human volunteers recruited via the crowdsourcing site Zooniverse.

Now, a group called Mapping Prejudice is uncovering these roots of the city’s racial disparities by documenting and mapping all of the old restrictive covenants in Minneapolis.

The effects still reverberate today: Despite its reputation for prosperity and progressive politics, Minneapolis now has the lowest rate of homeownership among African American households of any U.S. city.

They were reinforced by redlining, a discriminatory home lending practice promulgated by real estate agents and federal housing programs in the 1930s; later, urban planning decisions on highways and other infrastructure projects followed the lines inscribed by decades-old covenants.

As far back as the early 1900s, racially restrictive covenants on property deeds prevented African Americans and other minorities from buying homes in many other areas throughout the city.

The biggest difference is that Romney is running for president and needs more people to like him. Conard doesn’t have to worry about that. “People get very angry before they change their mind,” he said. “Economics is counterintuitive. It just is.”

One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts.

If some rich people are able to get and stay rich by messing around with the rules, then those art-history majors will feel as if they have no chance to break into a well-connected, well-protected elite.

Conard, for instance, insists that even the dodgiest financial products must have been beneficial or else nobody would have bought them in the first place.

Why do some countries grow so rich and others stay poor? Where you come down on the answer has as much to do with your politics as your economic worldview (two things that can often be the same)

“If the payoff for risk-taking is better, people will take more risks.”

By taking billions out of productive investment, he was depriving the middle class of the potential of its 20-to-1 benefits.

Conard offered to work for less until Romney decided he had added enough value to deserve a bonus and stock options.

He looks like a benign middle-aged guy until he starts making an argument.

“It’s not like the current payoff is motivating everybody to take risks,”

They are also wealthy investors like him, who are willing to risk their own money to finance improvements that may or may not work.

so I asked him to show me how his ideas play out in the real world.

but Conard hopes that the arguments detailed in his book will help readers understand why it’s so crucial that his former boss — who believes the government should help the investor class — win this November.

He argues that collateralized-debt obligations, credit-default swaps, mortgage-backed securities and other (now deemed toxic) financial products were fundamentally sound.

Every once in a while, this system breaks down. For one reason or another, the savers panic and demand all their money back. This causes a massive problem because the money isn’t sitting at the bank; it’s out in the world in the form of long-term loans.

It was a simple, old-fashioned run on the banks, which, he says, were just doing their job.

like seed companies and fast-food restaurants — have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more.

He has spent the last four years writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the superrich’s role in our society.

With that in mind, I recently met Edward Conard on 57th Street and Madison Avenue, just outside his office at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he helped build into a multibillion-dollar business by buying, fixing up and selling off companies at a profit.