Can a family increase its assets and "own" its children's way up the economic ladder? Research from Julia Isaacs released by the Pew Economic Mobility Project suggests that black families are less likely to be able to pass along their economic success to their children than are white families. This phenomenon may in part be due to the significant black-white wealth gap--a gap that dwarfs the black-white income gap--which NYU professor Dalton Conley argues accounts for many socioeconomic disparities between blacks and whites. Conley has written in The Nation that,
"For much of the growing black middle class, a lack of assets means living from paycheck to paycheck, being trapped in a job or a neighborhood that is less beneficial in the long run, or not being able to send one's kids to top colleges. Income provides for day-to-day, week-to-week expenses; wealth is the stuff that upward mobility is made of."
Nevertheless, it was striking to see Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s recent opinion piece in the New York Times, which argued that there might be a connection between the economic success of some black Americans today and their family's property ownership...in 1920.
"I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans, people in fields ranging from entertainment and sports (Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee) to space travel and medicine (the astronaut Mae Jemison and Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon). And I’ve seen an astonishing pattern: 15 of the 20 descend from at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920 — a time when only 25 percent of all African-American families owned property."
While he makes clear he's not certain about the details of the relationship between property ownership and intergenerational economic success, Gates suggests that one possible transmission method of the property's advantages from one generation to the next might be that "People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not."
Hopefully Professor Gates will further explore this possible relationship in his forthcoming book, In Search of Our Roots, or some other analysis.
2 comments:
this is what I learned in my intl housing comparisons class too
I remember liking that piece by Gates, too, but I was left wondering what the solution should be. Should we make inroads into closing the black-white wealth gap by encouraging better asset-building among black families or weaken and possibly eliminate "inheritance rights" and intergenerational wealth transfers? If our goal is to live in a society with real equal opportunity for upward mobility, the latter seems more appealing to me in principle. Or maybe there's a third way...
Post a Comment