CURMUDGUCATION: The Wealth Gap: Worse Than You Think

CURMUDGUCATION: The Wealth Gap: Worse Than You Think:

The Wealth Gap: Worse Than You Think

How much is whiteness worth? The answer turns out to be "a whole heck of a lot."

A new report with the unsexy title "Asset Value of Whiteness" has been released jointly by Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy (Brandeis University), two left-tilted thinky tanks. The researchers used the Survey of Consumer Finances, a tri-annual data crunch sponsored by the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury Department-- so not a bunch of amateur data creators. The report is brief and in plain English and I recommend you read it, but let me hit the highlights here.

The basic message is right there in the table of contents:

Attending college does not close the racial wealth gap.

Raising children in a two-parent family does not close the racial wealth gap

Working full time does not close the racial wealth gap

Spending less does not close the racial wealth gap


What's striking-- even shocking-- about the report is not just that these things don't help, but how huge the gap remains in the face of these. 

Look at this graph:

The part that leaps out is how much greater the wealth is for college-educated white households-- the median white college-educated adult household wealth is over seven times greater than the median black college-educated wealth. But the shocking finding here is that the median wealth for white high school drop outs is still higher than the median wealth for blacks who have attended college, and barely a hair less than wealth of college-educated Latinos.

This is the pattern that continues through the report. The median single-parent white family has more than twice as much wealth as the median two-parent black household. The median white CURMUDGUCATION: The Wealth Gap: Worse Than You Think: