[jagthebeetle]

Doesn't this trend manifest in European countries as well? (E.g. https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/poverty-rates-among-ethnic-gro...). I don't know about equality, but correlation seems to be there and doesn't strike me as intuitively "weird," or surprising, if undesirable.

Now the linkage in the zeitgeist of race and socioeconomics is another matter. I'd be curious if it can be attributed convincingly to some American social factor (racial heterogeneity, our media, our relative lack of ethnically meaningful home states), but that's one for the social historians.

[Balero]

It's not as clear cut. Much of the non-European immigration took place fairly recently (post war time) and people migrated mainly to cities.

Urban areas tend to be wealthier (obvs not always, but it is a trend) and have more opportunities. SO whilst these immigrants were at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder where they were, they were on a different ladder to those in rural areas.

So you get rural areas of poor people of largely European descent, and a more mixed (due to more economic mobility) city wealth demography.

This is not the whole story, but I think could be part of it.

[iguy]

In the northern parts of the US, the timeline is not so different -- there were some black people there in 1940, but a large majority moved up postwar. To work in industries which are now dead, concentrated in certain cities, but not to the rural parts in between.

[systemtest]

In the Netherlands, people in rural areas are wealthy. They are either older folks with large pensions and investment accounts, farmers with large plots of expensive land or people with good paying jobs that want out of the busy city.

A nice house out in the country is at least half a million.

[gph]

That sounds roughly the same as the US, just at a different scale and more recent.