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0 pointsjimbokun5y ago0 comments

"1) Unskilled labor; to

2) Professional labor loaded with student loan/mortgage debt; to

3) Financial stability; to

4) Being able to launch high-risk high-reward ventures

That's possible, but it generally takes a few generations"

That sequence is coming up a lot lately in discussions of African Americans low wealth accumulation across generations, relative to whites.

In the sense that, first through slavery, then through Jim Crow, then through red-lining, and other forms of egregious discrimination, that multi-generational sequence of wealth accumulation has been artificially interrupted.

It's not clear what should be done to rectify that imbalance. (Reparations? Or is it enough to allow this sequence to play out unobstructed starting with current generation of African Americans, similarly to if they were a new immigrant family.)

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wegs5y ago

Perhaps it might be enough to allow this sequence to play out is if they were a new immigrant family if it was actually playing out. At least where I live, it's not. Socioeconomic mobility is dead.

My family has moved up these rungs, and someone seems to have unscrewed the rungs. They just don't seem to be there anymore. Public schools no longer have:

* Gifted and talented programs

* Or any other support for kids getting ahead of standards (even quality books in the library)

This is all done in the name of social justice. The only families who can get ahead are ones who are already educated enough to teach their kids at home, or rich enough to hire tutors and pay for afterschool programs.

I'm not opposed to reparations per se, if someone were to make a coherent proposal (I haven't seen one, and with each generation, it gets harder to make one, as there aren't clean lines between former slaves, slaveowners, people who benefited from slavery, etc.), but I'm not actually sure they would help. If my grandparents on my dad's side were slaves, and on my mom's side, owned slaves, am I paying reparations? Am I getting paid? How's this even supposed to work?

And how would we manage this so it wouldn't be like winning a lotto, where the money just fades into nothing?

But on the whole, I'm more a fan of fixing obvious problems, such as how public school funding ranges at least 4-5x between rich and poor districts, issues with criminal justice, and so on.

I'm also a fan of targeted subsidies. I wouldn't mind if my taxpayer dollars paid for subsidies for lower-income kids to have the same sort of access to at-home and out-of-schools supports as my child does (STEM resources, programs like RSM/AoPS, etc.). Or if we had entrepreneurship subsidies in lower-income communities. Or more equitable tax structures. And so on.

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