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by DuskStar 2402 days ago
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.
1 comments
iknowalot 2402 days ago
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.

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DuskStar 2402 days ago
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)

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iknowalot 2402 days ago
>...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.

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