Oh that’s crazy, almost as if there was systemic oppression and injustice and rampant racist laws and police and policies for hundreds of years and that it still hasn’t fully ended because people can be absolutely horrible to each other over something as trivial as skin color.
I would love to see the comparison to people in other countries to prove that point. Because the racists will look at the headline and go “yep, because they don’t work hard, blah blah blah”, but it is actually the residual effects of slavery and racism that persist to this day in every single aspect of our society. From laws, to police, to medicine, to jobs, to housing, to finance, to our language to the damn foods we have. It is insane and the racists will proudly and wrongly stand up and declare that racism ended with slavery.
Similar in NZ, figures from 2015.
The median net wealth of European people was $114,000, more than three times that of the Asian population ($32,000), five times that of Māori ($23,000), and nine times greater than Pacific people ($12,000).
https://www.stats.govt.nz/reports/wealth-patterns-across-ethnic-groups-in-new-zealand/
Much of the colonialism of NZ was modeled from the US-Indigenous colonialism, we didn’t have chattel slavery though. Which could explain the magnitude of the gap in Ma. compared to NZ.
This is not as crazy as it sounds. Most people’s net worth is in their house. A white median net worth of $550k reflects white homeowners. A black median net worth of $7800 reflects black renters.
This is directly due to US policies post-WWII that directly benefited white homeowners and helped them build generational wealth. 80 years later we are still seeing the effects.
Even if all current racism magically ended tomorrow, we would still have a ton of work to do to undo the lingering damage of historical racism.
Im hugely in debt, but my house has like 250k in equity. Buying this house was the best thing I ever lucked into doing.
That’s the funny thing. You could have a huge house debt with massive repayments, but your net worth is based on the value of the house and what you still owe. Your disposable income is comparable to a homeless person.
I felt dirt poor right up until my last payment.
Yeah, I’m not American, and the Dutch housing market has been insane the last… 20 years or so. I did the maths a while ago, and my house has gone up in value about 60 euros every single day.
Yeah my parents house went from 800k (ehen they built it) to nearly 5 million in 20 years here in Switzerland. Absolutely bonkers. That’s like 500 swiss francs per day.
Dutch as well. Never thought about it like that… Mine has probably gone up 47 euros a day…
The article finds the same pattern:
Renters: $1,500
and also still have segregation in some form of another, plus racial biases when hiring employees.
The focus on black/white family disparity is interesting since the same article places Hispanic family median net wealth at just $1,200–or, basically 1/6th the net wealth of a demographic which has less than half their population in the state.
The white/hispanic disparity seems like the most stark racial contrast in the article with white family net wealth averaging 457 times the Hispanic family median.
For reference, Massachusetts’ population is approximately 7,044,056, with racial breakdowns as follows:
66.6% White 13.3% Hispanic 7.3% Asian 6.4% Black 5.1% Multiracial 1.3% Native American/Other
As someone who previously lived in Massachusetts, this doesn’t surprise me - systematic racism was rife in MA through the 70s. Jim Crow laws got their start in MA.
the median without listing the standard deviation is almost as bad as the mean (for some datasets) I strongly suspect there are very few people between $100,000 and $200,000 because getting a home is that important to staying afloat and the stark racial difference is because one group has more than 50% homeownership and the other a fair bit less.
Standard deviation is meaningless for data sets, like wealth distribution, that are not normally distributed.
Wouldn’t it still tell you how concentrated the data are around the mean? Just not as reliably as for a gaussian distribution.
Things like wealth and income (and alcohol consumption) don’t even have useful mean. They’re monotonically decreasing distributions with most people scoring near 0 and a few people scoring extremely high. It’s more like an exponential distribution than a gaussian.
In the US, mean household wealth is something like 3-4x the median, and if you plug the numbers into the standard deviation formula, you’ll get something close to the mean. Even greater. Maybe that informs a very sophisticated statistician audience, but if you tell the general public ‘standard deviation,’ they think “63% of people are within that of the mean,” and that is only true of Gaussian. For exponential distribution, mean±SD gets approximately all the samples.
TYVM!
The fuck are you talking about? It’s still a perfectly useful statistic.
Only the sith deal in absolutes.
the median without listing the standard deviation is almost as bad as the mean (for some datasets) I strongly suspect there are very few people between $100,000 and $200,000
So, you’re saying a standard deviation is useless too? If there’s not a normal distribution, then a standard deviation is probably more pointless than a median
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
i remember a while ago i read that the average wealth of a black person in (new york? or somewhere else?) was $8. fucking $8. it’s still running through my head. wtf
probably pay to pay check, or living with government “Welfare” PROGRams.
You can’t even buy lunch for $8 in New York.
Said I need about tree fifty
I ain’t givin you no tree fitty you damn loch ness monster!
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson should be required reading for everyone in america
thanks for the suggestion!
if anyone has any other suggestions feel free to drop a reply
https://www.history.com/articles/tulsa-race-massacre
https://eji.org/news/wilmington-massacre-of-1898/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51243325-wilmington-s-liehttps://www.prisonpolicy.org/research/racial_and_ethnic_disparities/
https://worldmetrics.org/racism-in-america-statistics/
but really, just recall BLM and the foaming-at-the-mouth outrage reaction to that movement. remember how racist fascist ultranationalist nazi racists were screaming for blood over Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling for the anthem? racism (among many other -isms) never remotely went away, and is in fact maximally enabled and empowered by con-man in chief and his muppet goons.
disclosure: i’m not black, but i am part of the not-white-enough caste
i always thought colins, was an over-reaction anyways. nothing was said about aron rodgers, or the butke, oh way because they are white and wealthy, and somewhat attravtive.
the real story is this: “Families with higher education levels. Those with a respondent or spouse/partner with a graduate degree had family net wealth of about $947,400.”
but if you put that in the title of an article or a social media post it doesn’t piss off poor whites.
it should anyway, since those people often contribute less to society than the local garbageman.
Oi, how do you go to college if your family cant afford food, jackass?
you be in one that can
It does seem like 1 white billionaire living in Massachusetts might account for a good bit of this disparity.
If it was “mean” or “average” then sure, median not so much
This argument is exactly why I think we should use the Mode when discussing the state of an economy or even a sector of the economy. The mode would represent the actual conditions that the majority of people experience and throws extremes out altogether.
Ah, fair. I didn’t catch it was median. I just assumed average.
Goes to show I probably shouldn’t comment after midnight, lol.
