The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today
The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today
Just as past public policies created the racial wealth gap, current policy widens it.
By Joshua HollandTwitter
August 8, 2016
If current economic trends continue, the average black household will need 228 years to accumulate as much wealth as their white counterparts hold today. For the average Latino family, it will take 84 years. Absent significant policy interventions, or a seismic change in the American economy, people of color will never close the gap.
Those are the key findings of a new study of the racial wealth-gap released this week by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Corporation For Economic Development (CFED). They looked at trends in household wealth from 1983 to 2013a 30-year period that captured the rise of Reaganomics, expanded international trade and two major financial crashes fueled by bubbles in the tech sector and housing prices. The authors found that the average wealth of white households increased by 84 percent during those three decades, three times the gains African-American families saw and 1.2 times the rate of growth for Latino families.
To put that in perspective, the wealthiest Americansmembers of the Forbes 400 listsaw their net worths increase by 736 percent during that period, on average.
If those trends persist for another 30 years, the average white familys net worth will grow by $18,000 per year, but black and Hispanic households would only see theirs grow by $750 and $2,250 per year, respectively.
More:
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-average-black-family-would-need-228-years-to-build-the-wealth-of-a-white-family-today/
Igel
(35,356 posts)Perhaps worse, perhaps better.
We also have the funny "average white family" business, which, no doubt, includes some very non-average white families. It's a case where you really want to trim the range to avoid the stats being misleading. But these are mostly advocacy groups, and they don't mind misleading in the cause of right thinking.
Motivated reasoning seldom is reasonable.
raccoon
(31,119 posts)wealth by being farmers, landowners, etc., blacks were slaves.
Slaves, if they earn any money, their owner gets it.