[iknowalot]

The USA has spent 4+ centuries kicking certain communities down the Maslow Heirarchy, this was done on purpose through laws introducing redlining, Jim Crow, no access to the GI Bill, slavery etc...I'd like a world where we could judge people fairly on the same standard, but we purposely created economic underclasses and that comes with a certain amount of desperation that leads to crime.

White Americans = 70% of pop. , $100 trillion in wealth.

African Americans = 14% of the pop, $2.9 trillion in wealth

African Americans in particular owned almost 10-12% of the land in this country (true wealth) and were promised more from the government in reparations (40 acres) not long ago, but discriminatory policies stripped that land away from them over 100 years.

Being in the USA for 150-200 years results in atleast 500k-1million $ in wealth purely due to land and home value appreciation.

The average black person has about ~500$ in wealth. This isn't a fluke, this was designed... This is a country that criminalizes being poor more and more in many ways, so we can fall into the trap of revictimizing the underclass we created, this time using algos, if we are not careful.

[manfredo]

Yes, African Americans are disadvantaged as compared to whites. But how is that relevant to me previous comment?

When a judge is evaluating whether or not to grant parole, is he or she looking for a causal factor that will directly cause the convict to re-offend or is the judge evaluating the convict's situation with factors that are correlated with re-offending?

[DuskStar]

And you're also confusing correlation with causation here. Yes, "governmental policies have discriminated against African Americans and prevented the accumulation of wealth" is a valid hypothesis, but the data you've presented doesn't show it.

Showing causation with whole-group statistics is very, very hard.

[iknowalot]

It's not a hypothesis. It's hard to track money flows but not as hard as the anti-reparations crowd make it seem.

The majority of the $500k-1m baseline in white middle-upper class wealth is in homes and land handed down as inheritances, this is not debatable. That property allows a certain amount of leverage to invest in education, businesses etc...

The ben & jerry's founder talked about this in vivid detail on the campaign trail with Bernie Sanders. If he was black where he grew up, no GI bill = no cheap housing = no appreciation of property/land over his childhood = no financial leverage to build his company.

I can take risks and fail without going bankrupt thanks to familial wealth, that is a tremendous luxury not afforded to the group I'm mentioning.

[DuskStar]

Unfortunately for that argument, the vast majority of white wealth is not in the hands of the middle-upper class, and I highly doubt that the wealth of the 1% (or .1%) is mostly in homes and land inheritance. And if you're counting "middle-upper" as 80-95%, I think the top 5% has ~70% of the total wealth in the US... (for reference, 95th percentile is ~2.5m, or comfortably above your 500k-1m baseline. 1m is 88th percentile, 500k is 80th)

(And in any case, my point was just that it wasn't shown as causation in the stats you cited)

[iknowalot]

>...the vast majority of white wealth is not in the hands of the middle-upper class

You are correct on that point. More than 50% of the 100$ trillion is held by the top 10%.

On the other point, my point is the first $500k to 1million of wealth was due to inheritance... not the total wealth of the 1%.

Follow up: At one point, any white male could move westward and get free land (whether indegeous owned or not). 40-100 acres after a century+ of property value appreciation is quite a bit of wealth. The $500k-1m number I use as a baseline for white wealth is very conservative.