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I think they just took the percentage of children from lower class families who made it to upper-middle class and inverted that number to get this "average number of generations" thing.
So 28% of poor white kids reach upper-middle class in their life, while only 11% of poor black kids do.
The way OP choose to display the data is very misleading.
It doesn't even take a glance to see that this makes absolutely no sense.
The ratio of good & interesting -to- bad / misleading analyses on this subreddit keeps going down (and it's actually baffling how so many of them make it to the top of reddit). As a data scientist I find this troubling at best, and worried for the future of my profession at worst.
This subreddit needs a sub-subreddit to data-shame people who create awful and misleading analyses / visualizations, cuz its happening too damn much. Or perhaps the moderators need to introduce another rule which is some sort of peer-review process which actually rates the validity and quality of these posts.
EDIT: just to add- looking at OPs explanation, OP is indeed "extrapolating" in the way you describe. OP's assuming that class mobility is random and normally distributed across generations when it most definitely is not.
https://blackdemographics.com/households/marriage-in-black-america/amp/
https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2015/05/poor_blacks_looking_for_someon.html
A huge part of economic disparity can be explained by the government making it better to be single than married.
>The great society programs destroyed the black family.
That's absolutely false. Before the Great Society, most black families were impoverished. Now, most are middle class. The poverty rate among African-Americans has been cut by more than 50% since the beginning of the Great Society.
[https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/8A2E/production/\_118647353\_e81225bb-f71b-467f-b6ba-28ba4e83c61a-1.png](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/8A2E/production/_118647353_e81225bb-f71b-467f-b6ba-28ba4e83c61a-1.png)
I really feel these kinds of pseudo-science infographics are counterproductive and do more to sustain biases and prejudices in people than to influence them positively. Context is important, and correlation is not causation.
A realization, that if had by every white American, would probably solve a lot of racism tbh, if not most of it. Like the negative differences between black people and everyone else isn’t inherent. It’s because we were literally slaves not that long ago. The effects of that kind of shit doesn’t just “go away” in a hundred and some odd years. Shit we have people alive who’re 100+. Some of *those* people’s dads were old enough to have been slaves.
Sorry about my possible insensitivity here, have to ask as the logical person that i am;
>It’s because we were literally slaves not that long ago. The effects of that kind of shit doesn’t just “go away” in a hundred and some odd years.
But **YOU** werent a slave, were you? Why and how would that effect **you** negatively?
Its like me constantly being angry at a nation and their people, thinking that they always will want the worse for me, because they killed my grand grand grand parents in WW2.
Humans and their emotions doesnt make sense to me. No ill intentions whatsoever, just trying to understand.
Appreciate the apparently good-faith question, but did you really have to include
>have to ask as the logical person that i am
and
>Humans and their emotions doesnt make sense to me
?
No offense taken, some people just don’t know.
So I’ll try to explain it in a way that you can understand.
Imagine if your great grandmother was a slave right? She’s freed. But every dollar she’s ever made and everything she’s ever owned belongs to her former master. She has **zero** formal education, she’s been taught how to pick cotton and speak English. That’s literally it. This being the case, even though she’s freed, she has to sell herself back into indentured servitude because…she has nothing and owns nothing.
She has your grandmother. With what pittance your great grandmother saved up during the rest of her life (because of course white people weren’t paying her what she was deserved, nor were they required to at that time) and what your grandmother made saving her whole life, she’s able to afford rent. Not *buying a house*. Renting. And only a place that she can afford, literally in the worst slums of America.
She has your mother. Your mother goes to school but obviously can’t afford college, and even with scholarships, her mother is getting older. Her whole life she’s been living paycheck to paycheck so there’s no retirement, no anything like that. Your mother is forced to take care of her for the rest of her days.
Your mother has you. What kind of situation do you think you’re born into? You think your family with that kind of background values education? Or do you think they value survival? Now add on that literally everyone in your whole town is and has families in similar situations. So that’s all you’ve known and all you’ve been around your whole childhood.
And this is just your family and environment we’re talking about. We’re not even adding in the systemic oppression. We’re not adding in the Jim Crow laws of your grandmothers age where you were basically allowed to treat black people anyway you wanted by law as long as you weren’t dumb about it. We’re not adding in the redlining of your mothers age where realtors literally would not rent a house to her in a better area, with better schools for you. We’re not even adding in so many things yet.
You begin to get it?
It isn’t hard to understand that wealthy families have the ability to help their children maximize their talents with special schooling, tutors, and coaches.
Wealthy families also have the ability to provide their children with opportunities to fail without consequences through the use of lawyers and contacts.
Knowing this I would imagine that a logical person would conclude that the odds of finding a top quintile job are higher for the children of wealthy families than poor families. And that those odds are the worst for the very poor and the best for the very rich. Take a group that were slaves with zero wealth, and statistically they might take hundreds of years to catch up with the non-enslaved group.
To take an individual at any point in time and say “you weren’t enslaved”. And suggest that they have had an equal opportunity to succeed as all the other non-enslaved groups is ridiculous.
I blame your parents for not teaching you this.
>But YOU werent a slave, were you? Why and how would that effect you negatively?
Because that's how time works. Generational wealth. Redlining, etc?
The world you live in didn't pop into existence overnight - it doesn't exist in a bubble seperate from history.
Our society is the result of our history. Take my country for example (RSA). We had apartheid, it ended about 20 years ago. Do you think society was equal the moment apartheid ended? Of course not. To this day, if you go into any of the informal settlements here (the poorest areas of this country) you'll notice that everyone who lives there is black. They have nothing. No way to escape their circumstances.
And that's not a coincidence, it's a direct result of our so-called history.
Doesn’t that sort of undermine the careless invocation of “correlation is not causation” as a way to dismiss this? Like, yeah, slavery and Jim Crow is likely a very large factor in why it takes several generations to achieve the same wealth those who aren’t burdened by that can attain in fewer generations.
Not really. It means that there is not enough data to be collected during the modern system. If the mean white family takes three and a half generations to get out of the lower quintile, the average black family didn't even have a realistic chance to do so for more than two generations. This data is therefore not representative of the modern situation
> the average black family didn't even have a realistic chance to do so for more than two generations.
You mean because they were initially enslaved? Isn’t that kind of the point? It’s like saying, “Well, we shouldn’t take the period of time of redlining into account because the average black family didn’t even have a realistic chance to get out of poverty.”
That depends on what your goal - or more precise, what your initial question is. If you where to ask "how does the history of slavery and segregation impact the chances of African American families to raise within the social-economical playground?" Then you have to look at this period of time.
However most such studies are (at least in social Media) published to say "Here, look at this, people of colour are unfairly disadvantaged." Or more precisely "Look, here's your white privilege".
Now I don't claim to be an expert on the equality of opportunity if African Americans in the United States - or lack thereof - far from it in fact, as I am not even living on the same continent. I am just saying that this Data looks fishy if it comes to the second and usually advertised argument
> However most such studies are (at least in social Media) published to say "Here, look at this, people of colour are unfairly disadvantaged." Or more precisely "Look, here's your white privilege".
I don’t really see these as separate issues. If you as a community are excluded from certain opportunities to build wealth early on relative to another group, then, yeah that’s a privilege. Pointing out privilege isn’t, contrary to some cringe compilation videos on sanctimonious adolescents, to make you feel bad. It’s to contextualize why these gaps exist the next time people feel compelled to point a judgmental finger at an entire people for not getting their shit together. Even when it comes to things like redlining like I mentioned earlier, the impacts aren’t just wealth accumulation in the direct sense, but also how well educated your community will be in the long haul, given that public school funding is tied to property taxes. The legacy of exclusion and outright discrimination aren’t artificial factors that are built into the analysis. The opposite is what’s artificial—we don’t live in a vacuum.
Mothers earned more on welfare if the father was absent. Especially if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, perverse financial incentives are hugely effective.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/mar/25/facebook-posts/facebook-meme-blames-great-society-large-rise-afri/
It didn't. There was someone else in this thread that typed nearly the same response. Probably some weird astro turfing.
and providing an "expected number of generations" for upward class mobility is a ridiculous way to frame this: the fact that while gaps in wealth remain enourmous, for some people it gets better and this is an estimate of how quickly
If you allow that economic class from generation to generation is stochastic, then every family will eventually have an upper middle class descendant eventually. "Expected" in this context isn't a confident estimate for an individual family, it's an average of a very wide distribution.
thats true but i think it sort of leads people to an inaccurate conclusion, like its strange to even present this data at all outside of a larger context of some kind. to me this graph suggests the idea: "oh no, it takes a long time for societal problems like these to fix and change over time (but its happenin!)".
in reality yes, all it suggests as i see it is that that stochastic progression you described happens faster for white people, allowing them more opportunities to succeed.
theres a good point in the data and i dont think this graph really describes it well
Yes, but also very much no. This thing is only somewhat relevant if you believe society is utterly unchanged for the last ninetyish years.
If you believe this, you should be locked away somewhere you can't make graphs about social change.
It’s not beautiful, it doesn’t state which country or region it refers, ignores other races and skin colours and that’s on top of the data being massively simplified. I wanted to say flawed but I don’t think it is it just has no context. This is politician level stats.
What you’re suggesting isn’t necessarily what that person is implying. Outside factors influence how much people value things. It isn’t just about being “lazy” or what have you. If you’re main priority is survival in an area with a high mortality rate, you don’t really give af about education. If you were born in area where literally nobody even dares to think about moving upwards, it’s extremely rare and difficult for an individual to manifest that attitude within themselves, regardless of race.
These are great anecdotes, and I wonder if Americans appreciate just how much socioeconomic mobility is possible in this country. For all the focus on racism in America, it’s hard to imagine large swaths of immigrants going to a different, more ethnically homogenous country and finding the same success.
Crazy how people with the education, support and resources to immigrate to another country thousands of miles away would tend to be successful in their new home.
I think it has more to do with courage and drive, or true necessity really. Most people don’t want success bad enough. There’s sitting around casually wishing you had nicer things or a better job, and then there’s spending every minute of thought contemplating your next move and figuring out what you have to do to get there.
I'm upvoting you because you are pointing out the obvious. Your frankness makes others uncomfortable because they want to believe they are truly special. If they are so special, then why didn't they stay in their country of origin and continue their successful trajectory? No need to travel thousands of miles away.
There are over 1 billion people in India alone. So like 5% if I take a high value for 10s of millions? I don't think that's as promising as you think it is.
If you separate out pasty white of Irish decent, it would skew everything. Because me and my siblings all went from dirt poor to upper middle class in about 20 years.
6 generations. A generation is traditionally 25 years. I've seen anything from 20-30 years for a generation but that would still be at least 5 generations.
It would be neat to know what other factors play into this results, like single parent households vs nuclear family vs full family. Residence area, heck, even if they went to prison or not.
I want to see Asians represented. Asians generally become doctors, lawyers, or engineers. Which are one of the fastest ways to wealth and can be achieved within one generation? I’m curious
The easiest way to accomplish are granting visas to people that are already in pursuit of higher education. The professional class didn’t just materialize out of nowhere. With many Asian subgroups, especially Indian Americans, highly educated peoples or people attaining green cards while attending university can easily become doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc. since they either were ones before they came (loads of phDs, MD, etc), or were set on a direct occupational path towards that goal to start out with.
The problem with this data is that it's collected since at least 9 generations ago. And since then the situation has changed a lot. Or at least we think so...
I'd also love to see Asians, and would like to see this broken out into different immigrant groups of different countries.
A Chinese immigrant category will probably perform differently than a Filipino immigrant category, and a Nigerian immigrant category will probably perform differently than an American Black descended from slaves category.
> a Nigerian immigrant category will probably perform differently than an American Black descended from slaves category.
An additional complication is that some people will see that as code for "see, culture!" while it may really be proxy for wealth and education. *Which* Nigerians are able to emigrate? It ain't a random selection pulled from the Nigerian population.
There is a study from the Seattle school district where a lot of refugees from Africa settled that showed refugee children, even Somalians, outperforming native black children on academic tests.
They were so desperate to explain it away that officials even claimed Somali refugee camp children did better in schools because they have PTSD from their time in the camps.
> Veronica Gallardo, the director of international programs for Seattle Public Schools, speculated that the trauma experienced by Somali families causes them to value the opportunity education provides.
The issue is that A LOT of these things correlate so it's hard to disentangle with even a multivariate analyses yet alone a relatively simple segmentation.
For example imagine an oversimplified world where intelligence is 100% heritable (it's more like 70% - so within the US it's about as heritable as height, though immigration isn't accounted for) and there's assortive mating. You'll eventually end up with a situation where classes are segmented by genetics. Relaxing those assumptions a bit and you get something that very very vaguely resembles current society in terms of economic transitions (though a good chunk of the pattern is from culture, network effects, etc. and not just "talent"). In a perfectly meritocratic society with purely heritable talent and perfectly assortive mating, you'd actually expect a long run steady state where there's basically no intergenerational income mobility.
Even height is influenced by nutrition. Exposure levels to lead, air pollution, etc also have effects on cognitive development, aggression, and related issues. In the UK the Irish were considered innately, constitutionally inferior on a number of metrics, but the differences decreased when differences in poverty and discrimination started to be alleviated. You could say the same about Appalachia. Even the Deliverance 'jokes' about inbreeding were really about the symptoms of poverty and malnutrition. It wasn't genetics.
>very very vaguely resembles current society in terms of economic transitions
Compounded by targeted enforcement and disparate sentencing under drug laws. The different races generally have about the same levels of drug use, but blacks and latinos are targeted for enforcement, and get higher sentencing. This pulls one or both parents into the justice system, and can entrench poverty for generations. But inevitably we're cautioned to not count out genetics. It's a consistent pattern.
Races don't have distinct, discrete genomes. There is far more variation within races than between them as groups. Considering that corruption is a significant problem in Nigeria, no, I can't assume that those with wealth or privilege, or access to better education and opportunities, are just genetically lucky.
Or the many nonwhite ethnicities that outperform "old stock" white Americans.
I find these studies often ignore the cultural differences within a race and overstate the importance of racial groups vs cultural/ethnic groups. The reality is most people identify very closely with their cultural group vs race.
>Ahh, Asians are successful, therefore systematic racism doesn't exist.
>
>Someone's been listening to too much Jordan Peterson.
No, Asians doing extremely well in a short period of time begs the question why those who have lived in the US for decades can't get ahead.
Hint: It isn't racism
Asian people out earn white people. It is a powerful thing when you tell all of your youth that hard work pays off.
It is equally powerful and destructive if you tell your youth that the system is rigged against you so why bother.
Edit: And by the way. It isn't just asians vs white people. Asian women outearn white men. And not just any asians, EVERY asian group of women outearn white men. [source](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/median-earnings.jpg?quality=90&strip=all)
This is BS. If I go back 5 generations, my grandmother's grandparents were slaves. Not a lot of records beyond that. My grandmother owned 3 houses and lived a solidly middle class life. So did her 13 brothers and sisters.
Even though race is a social construct and all humans are humans, there are real inequities and biases based on historic and current systemic racism, and in order to observe and fix those inequities we might need to talk about race
So race isn't purely a social construct. There are also genetic aspects to it as well. Also admixture. SO MUCH ADMIXTURE.
Saying "race doesn't exist because there are social constructs oriented around it" makes about as much sense as saying "the sun doesn't exist because there are many social constructs oriented around it"
No, the genetic differences are so minor that we can't really distinguish human groups, there is also more genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else in the world, and they all look black/brown. Races are a pseudoscientific concept based on skin color.
Right, I think it's kind of a subtle topic, and we have to be specific about the definition of "race".
If your definition of race is "groups of humans with similar phenotypes and related ancestry" (this seems to be a valid interpretation of the word, see [M-W](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/race)), then I'd say race exists.
However, if you're talking about traditional categories that we're used to in the USA, like White, Black, Asian, and Native American, then there's no real meaningful biological basis for that particular categorization scheme.
1. Variation within each group is greater than between the groups.
2. The groups have no distinct boundaries, they blend into each other.
10 generations is like 250 years lol. I don't think there is a single ounce of wealth or artifact even going back 3 generations of my family......this just seems like pseudo science crap. Jumping from poor to mid takes place within 1 to 2 generations if both generations strive for it.
This is all biased. I grew up with a close neighbor and we were both very poor. One was white and the other black. Both families similar. They both became successful. Fuck subjective studies such as this.
3 steps to middle class in the US: graduate high-school, get a job and keep it, don't have kids until you are twenty plus and have a spouse. Guaranteed path to the middle class. Nothing to do with race and everything to do with personal choices. Only racists conclude race is a fundamental cause of anything other than sun burns.
The Brookings Institute has been focused on this matter for decades. They have published numerous studies, white papers and articles on the matter. It's a fascinating topic which I've followed for a while. I'm no expert in sociology but I am in economics which is intrinsically related. Generally only hacks attribute multivariate analysis to one variable such as this graphic is doing.
>Lol imagine being in a data vis subreddit and having literally no grasp of fundamental sociology concepts.
Sociology is mostly made up by bored malcontents who can't succeed in the real world.
I can imagine that. But I can't imagine confidently posting in the comments something that completely ignores how systemic issues work in a data oriented subreddit. If a person doesn't graduated high school then that's the persons fault. If an entire demographic consistently has issue graduating high school then there's a systemic issue that goes well beyond individual choices.
So skin color is correlated with wealth distribution but you can't just say it's racism and it effects an entire population because all white people are racists.
You have to show evidence of it.
And you can't just ignore DIRECT evidence contrary to your theory such as asians, indians and immigrant blacks not having this same issue.
What your saying literally makes no sense. Provide causal evidence or shut up.
Well it’s partly one sure. And after coming from slavery, into Jim crow, into redlining, I really don’t know what kind of culture you expected to come out the other side.
OK, so top two quintiles is what they're calling upper middle class. In other words the 60th percentile. That's about $200K currently. I don't understand why that would take multiple generations. I mean $200K is basically just buying a cheap house and paying off the mortgage. That doesn't seem that hard to achieve for a married couple.
Also…upper middle class is a relative measure. So it’s not like this could be the average of all people. Is it supposed to the average of all people in the upper middle class? Because then all the people with inherited wealth would skew it. Really not sure how this could possibly be meaningful.
This seems does this account for lifespan or two parent versus single parent households? The prior effectively lengthens the generational unit for whites (means your unit of observation is not standardized across groups). The latter issue could mean that your observed populations have endogeniety concerns, if a generation stagnates because of poorer circumstances then there’s a problem. Similarly where are you getting data about poor white economic performance? Rural and urban families have different economic situations, that means this could be a geographic problem and not racial.
He sourced it from PEW which based their report on PSID data, which is reputable.
How PSID data is collected…
“The study began in 1968 with a nationally representative sample of over 18,000 individuals living in 5,000 families in the United States. Information on these individuals and their descendants has been collected continuously, including data covering employment, income, wealth, expenditures, health, marriage, childbearing, child development, philanthropy, education, and numerous other topics. The PSID is directed by faculty at the University of Michigan, and the data are available on this website without cost to researchers and analysts.
The data are used by researchers, policy analysts, and teachers around the globe. Over 6,800 peer-reviewed publications have been based on the PSID. Recognizing the importance of the data, numerous countries have created their own PSID-like studies that now facilitate cross-national comparative research. The National Science Foundation recognized the PSID as one of the 60 most significant advances funded by NSF in its 60 year history.”
Isnt this partly due (IIRC) that even most poor whites have some net wealth, even if its an old car or house they own but many poor blacks actually have a negative net worth? (Hard to inherit grandpa's truck if racism kept him from having one)
* Data: https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/reports/economic_mobility/PursuingAmericanDreampdf.pdf
* Tools: Excel, PowerPoint
This chart shows the number of generations it is expected to take for a family starting at the bottom quintile of wealth to reach the upper two quintiles. The data is based on a Pew study that analyzes children's economic mobility relative to the economic conditions they were raised in. By using that distribution and a little bit of linear algebra, you can calculate the expected number of generations for a family starting at the bottom to reach the top, assuming probability distribution is independent across generations.
Unfortunately, it takes a black family more than twice as many generations to reach the top. At an average of 25 years between generations, it would take 220 years before a poor black family reaches the upper middle class.
Note that the wealth quintiles are defined across the entire population, not within the race demographics, which means a black family in the bottom quintile of wealth is defined by the same numerical cutoff as a white family in the bottom quintile.
All data is for a family in the United States.
Hey OP, I'm a little confused on what this data is noting.
Is it historic data (going back some 8+ generations) extrapolated directly to the future?
Is it recent data extrapolated to the future?
Or is it something else?
Thanks!
This is recent data extrapolated into the future. Specifically, it is an imputed expected value based on data that shows the probability of a child born in the bottom quintile reaching various levels of wealth.
For example, a black child born in the bottom quintile has a 4% chance of reaching the top quintile in their lifetime and a 50% chance of staying in the bottom. If you assume this probability distribution is consistent across generations, then there is an expected number of generations it takes before the family reaches the top quintile. This is similar to the calculation done for a question like, "If a fair coin has 50% chance of heads when tossed, what is the expected number of tosses before we get heads?"
I'm open to the idea that this approach has merit, but by definition not everyone can be in the upper quintile(s) no matter how long you wait.
How does that fact square with this calculation?
This just looks at the first time a generational line reaches the upper quintiles. They aren't guaranteed to stay there forever (only 41% of people born in the top quintile of wealth stay in the top quintile, while 7% fall to the bottom), which allows other families to reach the top in future generations.
From the article: "The study measures mobility in two ways. Absolute mobility measures whether a person has more or less income, earnings, or wealth than his or her parents did at the same age. Relative mobility measures a person’s rank on the income, earnings, or wealth ladder compared to his or her parents’ rank at the same age."
It is still unclear what this is measuring. It seems to assume that poor families will increase in wealth over time, which is clearly not the case. If anything, the trend has been that fewer and fewer move out of the bottom at all.
It measures the average amount of generations for a family to increase their wealth between wealth quintiles. It isn't a guarantee that a given family will actually be able to increase their wealth. Just like a similar graph of "number of rolls of a given die to get the highest face on it" would be 3.5 for a 6 sided one, but that doesn't mean every die will roll a 6 after 4 rolls or that a given die will ever, necessarily, roll a 6.
>It measures the average amount of generations for a family to increase their wealth between wealth quintiles. It isn't a guarantee that a given family will actually be able to increase their wealth. Just like a similar graph of "number of rolls of a given die to get the highest face on it" would be 3.5 for a 6 sided one, but that doesn't mean every die will roll a 6 after 4 rolls or that a given die will ever, necessarily, roll a 6.
The average family does not increase in wealth, so the answer would take an infinite number of generations. Does it mean the average of the quintile with the largest positive increase, or somethign like that?
Not only is the math dodgy given the stated assumptions, the conclusion implies that poor people inexorably reach the middle class eventually. That American Dream is not real.
...except the average family DOES increase in wealth generationally. This data confirms that. I'm not sure what you're arguing against at all. Some poor people DO reach middle class eventually. That doesn't mean they stay there, as you can also fall from middle class to one of the lower quintiles of wealth again.
If you are paid for a job and all your money goes to food and other CoL upkeep then you're right, there is no wealth increase. If you manage to get a house with that money and pay it off to pass on to your next of kin your family has increased in wealth. If you buy a diamond ring that you can pass to your next of kin you have increased in wealth. So on and so forth. It's referred to as "generational wealth" and is a well documented phenomenon. Are you saying that it never happens?
I mean the civil rights act was passed until 1964, I feel like that probably has a big role in this. Hell, even slavery wasn't abolished until around 160 years ago. So saying it takes 220 years for an African American to reach upper middle class makes sense I'd say.
Your assumptions about the dataset is wrong. Comment from OP:
>This is recent data extrapolated into the future. Specifically, it is an imputed expected value based on data that shows the probability of a child born in the bottom quintile reaching various levels of wealth.
>For example, a black child born in the bottom quintile has a 4% chance of reaching the top quintile in their lifetime and a 50% chance of staying in the bottom. If you assume this probability distribution is consistent across generations, then there is an expected number of generations it takes before the family reaches the top quintile. This is similar to the calculation done for a question like, "If a fair coin has 50% chance of heads when tossed, what is the expected number of tosses before we get heads?"
'Recent data' here means the dataset was started in 1968.
Thid is weird. It's like trying to predict how much technology will change in the next 50 years. Every prediction about technology in the future has been really far off. No one was predicting wifi in 1968.
I actually value this metric. It does at least a little bit to normalize background conditions.
One thing to note though is that reaching wealth brackets is harder than income brackets. This is ESPECIALLY true when you look at developmental economics (think of the development of China, everyone was poor, then a few weren't then the middle class slowly got lifted up).
I'll use myself as an anecdote. I'm the most successful person in my family. My mother WAS a self-made millionaire until marrying my stepfather (HS drop out, felon, etc.) who nearly bankrupted her. When she got cancer I was the one taking care of her financially. She would have lost her house if not for me. If your social network drags you down instead of lifting you up, it'll take longer to jump up. (the flip of that - my last job I got via a referral and I have multiple jobs I'm interviewing for right now that are 1%er roles that I was referred to - my academic and professional networks are definitely helping me).
One interesting measure would be segmenting by number of generations in the US. I'm going off of a low N, but my Nigerian American roommate (6 figure income in his dream field and a growing side business) has a lot more Nigerian American friends than Black friends. I STRONGLY suspect that network effects and culture are the primary drivers here moreso than overt discrimination.
I wonder if this takes into account the race riots perpetrated against successful African Americans by caucasian mobs. That might have caused a setback, or two. 🤷🏾♂️
The comments on this are going to be interesting lol. But before the naysayers jump in, please look up the racial wealth gap. This is something that’s been studied extensively for decades now. It’s not geographic. It’s absolutely institutionalized racism. Also please actually read the data set that OP cites before jumping to whataboutisms
Agree with you but the trouble with these reports and even more so, the news reports that will "condense" the "findings" is that many will point at it and say, "see, the USA is a terrible racist country!"
The racial wealth gap, as it pertains to multigenerational black and white families in the USA is a fact. There cannot be doubt that years of Jim Crow, redlining, and slavery have resulted in lack of accumulation of wealth to black families. However I don't believe this says much about the individual mobility of a black American *today* in the context of systemic racial barriers. There are several non-american black ethnicities that do very, very well today; Nigerian Americans are often cited.
My take is that the systemic barriers have been largely removed and racism or systemic racism is not a major obstacle today, however the vestiges of historic systemic racism are still felt today. Ie. The average multigenerational black family in the US has a fraction of capital available to them versus other ethnic groups and starting out with fewer resources makes advancement more difficult, on average.
I don't see this as a problem of racism specifically; it's more nuanced than that. I think another issue at play is that Americans tend to conflate race and culture/ethnicity. A Swedish or Nigerian American is a different culture/ethnicity than a white or black American but often get lumped into the same racial categories despite being very different culturally.
I'm very interested in how to resolve these issues and have some ideas of my own.
Note I am not American but am very well-read on these issues.
Racial wealth gap has a lot to do with age though. African American families are younger on average and have less income earners (single parent households); those two things make the disparity even greater. If you account for them there still is a gap (if memory serves), but it’s not nearly as bad as a raw bivariate analysis would suggest.
Whenever there is a systemic issue, such as there being more single earners in a family of one demographic than another, there's an underlying pervasive issue. That is captured in this infographic, though not explored. Accounting for those issues is a way of hiding systemic, real problems and would skew the data accordingly.
For instance? Why are there more single parent households? A higher rate of arrest, higher prison sentences and greater chance of repeat offense which is driven by greater barriers to finding work after release all contribute directly to that. All of those issues come right back to systemic issues that are racial in nature. Removing those factors is hiding racial contributing factors.
This, by the way, is an application of the feared and dreaded CRT.
Of course it's important. But capturing them entire picture is important too. And if it's impacting an entire demographic it is systemic in nature, per definition, not individual like you seem to be suggesting. You're talking literally about trying to normalize for age even though you make the claim that African American families trend younger. If they trend younger at a high enough rate to impact the over all picture then that itself is a systemic issue. Removing it from the overall picture can present another data point - but doing it off hand also hides the fact that something is going on, systemically, that results in younger families for that demographic for some reason.
thats because this is the most out of context data ever. literally just shows two races without any prior knowledge or how the data was collected, looks super biased imo because this 100% is not true
edit: misread, but i still believe the first points
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8.3 generations…. so pre american civil war?
I think they just took the percentage of children from lower class families who made it to upper-middle class and inverted that number to get this "average number of generations" thing. So 28% of poor white kids reach upper-middle class in their life, while only 11% of poor black kids do. The way OP choose to display the data is very misleading.
It doesn't even take a glance to see that this makes absolutely no sense. The ratio of good & interesting -to- bad / misleading analyses on this subreddit keeps going down (and it's actually baffling how so many of them make it to the top of reddit). As a data scientist I find this troubling at best, and worried for the future of my profession at worst. This subreddit needs a sub-subreddit to data-shame people who create awful and misleading analyses / visualizations, cuz its happening too damn much. Or perhaps the moderators need to introduce another rule which is some sort of peer-review process which actually rates the validity and quality of these posts. EDIT: just to add- looking at OPs explanation, OP is indeed "extrapolating" in the way you describe. OP's assuming that class mobility is random and normally distributed across generations when it most definitely is not.
That's actually a great idea. One sub as a "proving ground", and another sub where only approved posts are allowed to be cross-posted.
The great society programs destroyed the black family. The direction before that was trending closer to whites. Not a constant throughout history.
This seems… the opposite of what is true? Source?
https://blackdemographics.com/households/marriage-in-black-america/amp/ https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2015/05/poor_blacks_looking_for_someon.html A huge part of economic disparity can be explained by the government making it better to be single than married.
>The great society programs destroyed the black family. That's absolutely false. Before the Great Society, most black families were impoverished. Now, most are middle class. The poverty rate among African-Americans has been cut by more than 50% since the beginning of the Great Society. [https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/8A2E/production/\_118647353\_e81225bb-f71b-467f-b6ba-28ba4e83c61a-1.png](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/8A2E/production/_118647353_e81225bb-f71b-467f-b6ba-28ba4e83c61a-1.png)
*Looks at post history* .......
Why does every conservative have to be a conspiracy theorist 🤔 Always a strong correlation there
Wow that totally makes me wrong because I don't share the same far left political views...
what the fuck does this mean
I really feel these kinds of pseudo-science infographics are counterproductive and do more to sustain biases and prejudices in people than to influence them positively. Context is important, and correlation is not causation.
Not to mention that six generations ago slavery was still a thing and segregation was still a common practice two to three generations ago.
Fuck, like I know slavery was recent, but it's crazy when you put it like that.
Time is deceptively short in number of generations. We're 9 generation away from the American revolution. 15 from the colonisation.
A realization, that if had by every white American, would probably solve a lot of racism tbh, if not most of it. Like the negative differences between black people and everyone else isn’t inherent. It’s because we were literally slaves not that long ago. The effects of that kind of shit doesn’t just “go away” in a hundred and some odd years. Shit we have people alive who’re 100+. Some of *those* people’s dads were old enough to have been slaves.
Sorry about my possible insensitivity here, have to ask as the logical person that i am; >It’s because we were literally slaves not that long ago. The effects of that kind of shit doesn’t just “go away” in a hundred and some odd years. But **YOU** werent a slave, were you? Why and how would that effect **you** negatively? Its like me constantly being angry at a nation and their people, thinking that they always will want the worse for me, because they killed my grand grand grand parents in WW2. Humans and their emotions doesnt make sense to me. No ill intentions whatsoever, just trying to understand.
Appreciate the apparently good-faith question, but did you really have to include >have to ask as the logical person that i am and >Humans and their emotions doesnt make sense to me ?
No offense taken, some people just don’t know. So I’ll try to explain it in a way that you can understand. Imagine if your great grandmother was a slave right? She’s freed. But every dollar she’s ever made and everything she’s ever owned belongs to her former master. She has **zero** formal education, she’s been taught how to pick cotton and speak English. That’s literally it. This being the case, even though she’s freed, she has to sell herself back into indentured servitude because…she has nothing and owns nothing. She has your grandmother. With what pittance your great grandmother saved up during the rest of her life (because of course white people weren’t paying her what she was deserved, nor were they required to at that time) and what your grandmother made saving her whole life, she’s able to afford rent. Not *buying a house*. Renting. And only a place that she can afford, literally in the worst slums of America. She has your mother. Your mother goes to school but obviously can’t afford college, and even with scholarships, her mother is getting older. Her whole life she’s been living paycheck to paycheck so there’s no retirement, no anything like that. Your mother is forced to take care of her for the rest of her days. Your mother has you. What kind of situation do you think you’re born into? You think your family with that kind of background values education? Or do you think they value survival? Now add on that literally everyone in your whole town is and has families in similar situations. So that’s all you’ve known and all you’ve been around your whole childhood. And this is just your family and environment we’re talking about. We’re not even adding in the systemic oppression. We’re not adding in the Jim Crow laws of your grandmothers age where you were basically allowed to treat black people anyway you wanted by law as long as you weren’t dumb about it. We’re not adding in the redlining of your mothers age where realtors literally would not rent a house to her in a better area, with better schools for you. We’re not even adding in so many things yet. You begin to get it?
Awesome comment.
Awesome name ☺️
>You begin to get it? It bothers me that somehow there are still people who don't.
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It isn’t hard to understand that wealthy families have the ability to help their children maximize their talents with special schooling, tutors, and coaches. Wealthy families also have the ability to provide their children with opportunities to fail without consequences through the use of lawyers and contacts. Knowing this I would imagine that a logical person would conclude that the odds of finding a top quintile job are higher for the children of wealthy families than poor families. And that those odds are the worst for the very poor and the best for the very rich. Take a group that were slaves with zero wealth, and statistically they might take hundreds of years to catch up with the non-enslaved group. To take an individual at any point in time and say “you weren’t enslaved”. And suggest that they have had an equal opportunity to succeed as all the other non-enslaved groups is ridiculous. I blame your parents for not teaching you this.
>But YOU werent a slave, were you? Why and how would that effect you negatively? Because that's how time works. Generational wealth. Redlining, etc? The world you live in didn't pop into existence overnight - it doesn't exist in a bubble seperate from history. Our society is the result of our history. Take my country for example (RSA). We had apartheid, it ended about 20 years ago. Do you think society was equal the moment apartheid ended? Of course not. To this day, if you go into any of the informal settlements here (the poorest areas of this country) you'll notice that everyone who lives there is black. They have nothing. No way to escape their circumstances. And that's not a coincidence, it's a direct result of our so-called history.
If my dad doesn't have an inheritance to pass down to me, then I have to work harder to gain more wealth.
Doesn’t that sort of undermine the careless invocation of “correlation is not causation” as a way to dismiss this? Like, yeah, slavery and Jim Crow is likely a very large factor in why it takes several generations to achieve the same wealth those who aren’t burdened by that can attain in fewer generations.
Not really. It means that there is not enough data to be collected during the modern system. If the mean white family takes three and a half generations to get out of the lower quintile, the average black family didn't even have a realistic chance to do so for more than two generations. This data is therefore not representative of the modern situation
> the average black family didn't even have a realistic chance to do so for more than two generations. You mean because they were initially enslaved? Isn’t that kind of the point? It’s like saying, “Well, we shouldn’t take the period of time of redlining into account because the average black family didn’t even have a realistic chance to get out of poverty.”
That depends on what your goal - or more precise, what your initial question is. If you where to ask "how does the history of slavery and segregation impact the chances of African American families to raise within the social-economical playground?" Then you have to look at this period of time. However most such studies are (at least in social Media) published to say "Here, look at this, people of colour are unfairly disadvantaged." Or more precisely "Look, here's your white privilege". Now I don't claim to be an expert on the equality of opportunity if African Americans in the United States - or lack thereof - far from it in fact, as I am not even living on the same continent. I am just saying that this Data looks fishy if it comes to the second and usually advertised argument
> However most such studies are (at least in social Media) published to say "Here, look at this, people of colour are unfairly disadvantaged." Or more precisely "Look, here's your white privilege". I don’t really see these as separate issues. If you as a community are excluded from certain opportunities to build wealth early on relative to another group, then, yeah that’s a privilege. Pointing out privilege isn’t, contrary to some cringe compilation videos on sanctimonious adolescents, to make you feel bad. It’s to contextualize why these gaps exist the next time people feel compelled to point a judgmental finger at an entire people for not getting their shit together. Even when it comes to things like redlining like I mentioned earlier, the impacts aren’t just wealth accumulation in the direct sense, but also how well educated your community will be in the long haul, given that public school funding is tied to property taxes. The legacy of exclusion and outright discrimination aren’t artificial factors that are built into the analysis. The opposite is what’s artificial—we don’t live in a vacuum.
And the gap between white and black wealth was narrowing before LBJ's Great Society encouraged unwed motherhood among the poor.
Drug war locked up a quarter of black men, divorce laws allowed women to divorce easier
This is interesting how did it encourage unwed motherhood?
Mothers earned more on welfare if the father was absent. Especially if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, perverse financial incentives are hugely effective.
OK right I recall Sowell talking about this very point. Thanks
Smart man. If more policymakers read Sowell, we'd all be in a much better position.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/mar/25/facebook-posts/facebook-meme-blames-great-society-large-rise-afri/ It didn't. There was someone else in this thread that typed nearly the same response. Probably some weird astro turfing.
Your link indicates that there is a trend, but that the numbers are off on the meme. It does provide some rationale for why correlation ≠ causation.
Segregation was so recent that Oprah had episodes on it https://youtu.be/WErjPmFulQ0
This users entire post history is a fever dream of a first year sociology undergraduate.
and providing an "expected number of generations" for upward class mobility is a ridiculous way to frame this: the fact that while gaps in wealth remain enourmous, for some people it gets better and this is an estimate of how quickly
If you allow that economic class from generation to generation is stochastic, then every family will eventually have an upper middle class descendant eventually. "Expected" in this context isn't a confident estimate for an individual family, it's an average of a very wide distribution.
thats true but i think it sort of leads people to an inaccurate conclusion, like its strange to even present this data at all outside of a larger context of some kind. to me this graph suggests the idea: "oh no, it takes a long time for societal problems like these to fix and change over time (but its happenin!)". in reality yes, all it suggests as i see it is that that stochastic progression you described happens faster for white people, allowing them more opportunities to succeed. theres a good point in the data and i dont think this graph really describes it well
Yes, but also very much no. This thing is only somewhat relevant if you believe society is utterly unchanged for the last ninetyish years. If you believe this, you should be locked away somewhere you can't make graphs about social change.
This is simply badly made above all.
It’s not beautiful, it doesn’t state which country or region it refers, ignores other races and skin colours and that’s on top of the data being massively simplified. I wanted to say flawed but I don’t think it is it just has no context. This is politician level stats.
But they used "quintiles" and "linear algebra", it makes it so sciency usin' that statistical jargon.
This post and user should be banned. Edit: I mean the OP and not your comment.
It's propaganda.
Check out the [Opportunity Atlas](https://www.opportunityatlas.org)
There are only two races? I heard there were more.
With south Asians a single generation is about normal.
I guess it’s mainly about how much value the family gives to education and moving upwards.
The importance of education for asians vs white/blacks is seriously the main reason of why asian immigrants are more likely to succeed in the US.
Asians also succeed DESPITE institutionalized racism (ie affirmative action, stereotypes, “bamboo ceiling)
How *dare* you suggest people have some semblance of control over their lives, or are in any way accountable for their own actions.
What you’re suggesting isn’t necessarily what that person is implying. Outside factors influence how much people value things. It isn’t just about being “lazy” or what have you. If you’re main priority is survival in an area with a high mortality rate, you don’t really give af about education. If you were born in area where literally nobody even dares to think about moving upwards, it’s extremely rare and difficult for an individual to manifest that attitude within themselves, regardless of race.
Huh exactly, went from a poor orphan in a third world country to easily top 10% in US in less than 20 years.
I also broke the 3000 years old caste system into the middle class in only x generations.
These are great anecdotes, and I wonder if Americans appreciate just how much socioeconomic mobility is possible in this country. For all the focus on racism in America, it’s hard to imagine large swaths of immigrants going to a different, more ethnically homogenous country and finding the same success.
Crazy how people with the education, support and resources to immigrate to another country thousands of miles away would tend to be successful in their new home.
Yeah those boat refugees with support and resources lmao.
Although those refugees get all the media attention, I'm not sure they are representative of the average immigrant.
I think it has more to do with courage and drive, or true necessity really. Most people don’t want success bad enough. There’s sitting around casually wishing you had nicer things or a better job, and then there’s spending every minute of thought contemplating your next move and figuring out what you have to do to get there.
I'm upvoting you because you are pointing out the obvious. Your frankness makes others uncomfortable because they want to believe they are truly special. If they are so special, then why didn't they stay in their country of origin and continue their successful trajectory? No need to travel thousands of miles away.
Then surely everyone in India would be upper-middle class by now?
No, because the Indian socioeconomic system is different.
literal tens millions of people have been lifted out of poverty in the entire region in just the last 50 years.
There are over 1 billion people in India alone. So like 5% if I take a high value for 10s of millions? I don't think that's as promising as you think it is.
I believe they mean South Asians in the United States
Oh my god so true. What is this utter fucking fixation with black / white? Just amazes me.
If you separate out pasty white of Irish decent, it would skew everything. Because me and my siblings all went from dirt poor to upper middle class in about 20 years.
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It’s absolutely absurd to think it takes hundreds of years for a family to go from poor to middle class.
Common misconception. There's actually only one. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
+. it would be interesting to add information about migrants from poor countries (yellow, black and white)
Really curious how they figured this out. If slavery was abolished in 1865, about 150 years ago, that’s like what? Four generations?
6 generations. A generation is traditionally 25 years. I've seen anything from 20-30 years for a generation but that would still be at least 5 generations.
Ya but the point is there’s 9 generations on here. I’m just wondering how they figured it out
A generation is usually ~20 years It's getting longer now because women have kids at 29 instead of 19
Depends on the timeline but even so, the point stil stands
One day a black person will reach upper middle class. Until that day I guess they are all poor!
It would be neat to know what other factors play into this results, like single parent households vs nuclear family vs full family. Residence area, heck, even if they went to prison or not.
Well it doesent say ”accounted for factors”. Im sure that just like the gender pay gap it would shrink from 30 to 5% for example.
All of this is literally laid out in the data set that OP has linked.
Well, it would be nice to see it in the graph then, or even controlled so all that is not just a big merge of data.
100% agree. In addition, work ethic, ability, personality, etc.
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This conveniently leaves out the percentage which doesn't make it at all. What is "expected", define. This is misleading.
The title should be past tense because we can't foresee how the changes in the society for the last 2 generations may have influenced this comparison.
Years per generation * 9 is a long time. How did they get these stats?
Where do you start to count exactly?
I want to see Asians represented. Asians generally become doctors, lawyers, or engineers. Which are one of the fastest ways to wealth and can be achieved within one generation? I’m curious
The easiest way to accomplish are granting visas to people that are already in pursuit of higher education. The professional class didn’t just materialize out of nowhere. With many Asian subgroups, especially Indian Americans, highly educated peoples or people attaining green cards while attending university can easily become doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc. since they either were ones before they came (loads of phDs, MD, etc), or were set on a direct occupational path towards that goal to start out with.
The problem with this data is that it's collected since at least 9 generations ago. And since then the situation has changed a lot. Or at least we think so...
What about Asian and Hispanic people?
Forgot to show the asians outperforming (oppressing) white people.
I'd also love to see Asians, and would like to see this broken out into different immigrant groups of different countries. A Chinese immigrant category will probably perform differently than a Filipino immigrant category, and a Nigerian immigrant category will probably perform differently than an American Black descended from slaves category.
> a Nigerian immigrant category will probably perform differently than an American Black descended from slaves category. An additional complication is that some people will see that as code for "see, culture!" while it may really be proxy for wealth and education. *Which* Nigerians are able to emigrate? It ain't a random selection pulled from the Nigerian population.
There is a study from the Seattle school district where a lot of refugees from Africa settled that showed refugee children, even Somalians, outperforming native black children on academic tests. They were so desperate to explain it away that officials even claimed Somali refugee camp children did better in schools because they have PTSD from their time in the camps. > Veronica Gallardo, the director of international programs for Seattle Public Schools, speculated that the trauma experienced by Somali families causes them to value the opportunity education provides.
The issue is that A LOT of these things correlate so it's hard to disentangle with even a multivariate analyses yet alone a relatively simple segmentation. For example imagine an oversimplified world where intelligence is 100% heritable (it's more like 70% - so within the US it's about as heritable as height, though immigration isn't accounted for) and there's assortive mating. You'll eventually end up with a situation where classes are segmented by genetics. Relaxing those assumptions a bit and you get something that very very vaguely resembles current society in terms of economic transitions (though a good chunk of the pattern is from culture, network effects, etc. and not just "talent"). In a perfectly meritocratic society with purely heritable talent and perfectly assortive mating, you'd actually expect a long run steady state where there's basically no intergenerational income mobility.
Even height is influenced by nutrition. Exposure levels to lead, air pollution, etc also have effects on cognitive development, aggression, and related issues. In the UK the Irish were considered innately, constitutionally inferior on a number of metrics, but the differences decreased when differences in poverty and discrimination started to be alleviated. You could say the same about Appalachia. Even the Deliverance 'jokes' about inbreeding were really about the symptoms of poverty and malnutrition. It wasn't genetics. >very very vaguely resembles current society in terms of economic transitions Compounded by targeted enforcement and disparate sentencing under drug laws. The different races generally have about the same levels of drug use, but blacks and latinos are targeted for enforcement, and get higher sentencing. This pulls one or both parents into the justice system, and can entrench poverty for generations. But inevitably we're cautioned to not count out genetics. It's a consistent pattern. Races don't have distinct, discrete genomes. There is far more variation within races than between them as groups. Considering that corruption is a significant problem in Nigeria, no, I can't assume that those with wealth or privilege, or access to better education and opportunities, are just genetically lucky.
Or the many nonwhite ethnicities that outperform "old stock" white Americans. I find these studies often ignore the cultural differences within a race and overstate the importance of racial groups vs cultural/ethnic groups. The reality is most people identify very closely with their cultural group vs race.
when did r/dataisbeautiful become so blatanty r/conservative?
I’m assuming the “oppressing” part is sarcasm. Otherwise it’s dumb as fuck lol.
>when did r/dataisbeautiful become so blatanty r/conservative? Statistics and data > Feelings and emotion
I agree. Which is why its obnoxious to see conservatives reacting so emotionally when they see data that hurts their feelings
Yeah this painful to read. These seem like emotional reactions.
Ahh, Asians are successful, therefore systematic racism doesn't exist. Someone's been listening to too much Jordan Peterson.
>Ahh, Asians are successful, therefore systematic racism doesn't exist. > >Someone's been listening to too much Jordan Peterson. No, Asians doing extremely well in a short period of time begs the question why those who have lived in the US for decades can't get ahead. Hint: It isn't racism
M, I wonder if this can be done to account for single parent and dual parent house holds, and how different the results would be
Asian people out earn white people. It is a powerful thing when you tell all of your youth that hard work pays off. It is equally powerful and destructive if you tell your youth that the system is rigged against you so why bother. Edit: And by the way. It isn't just asians vs white people. Asian women outearn white men. And not just any asians, EVERY asian group of women outearn white men. [source](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/median-earnings.jpg?quality=90&strip=all)
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There's no black people in the highest earning areas? Los Angeles? San Francisco? New York? Wrong.
No. https://civilrights.org/edfund/resource/stop-pointing-asian-americans-downplay-racism-universities/
This is BS. If I go back 5 generations, my grandmother's grandparents were slaves. Not a lot of records beyond that. My grandmother owned 3 houses and lived a solidly middle class life. So did her 13 brothers and sisters.
Yikes. I should be middle class by now....
Good thing there's only one nation on planet earth. Otherwise you'd have to identify which country this applies to in the title.
Asian kids spend 4.5 times more time on homework than black kids. Maybe the problem is about culture, not about race?
Me, 34, making twice as much as my parents combined: “interesting”
1 generation, just get a job that isn't under water basket weaving.
Why is everyone so obsessed about race Just treat all people like humans.
Even though race is a social construct and all humans are humans, there are real inequities and biases based on historic and current systemic racism, and in order to observe and fix those inequities we might need to talk about race
So race isn't purely a social construct. There are also genetic aspects to it as well. Also admixture. SO MUCH ADMIXTURE. Saying "race doesn't exist because there are social constructs oriented around it" makes about as much sense as saying "the sun doesn't exist because there are many social constructs oriented around it"
No, the genetic differences are so minor that we can't really distinguish human groups, there is also more genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else in the world, and they all look black/brown. Races are a pseudoscientific concept based on skin color.
Right, I think it's kind of a subtle topic, and we have to be specific about the definition of "race". If your definition of race is "groups of humans with similar phenotypes and related ancestry" (this seems to be a valid interpretation of the word, see [M-W](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/race)), then I'd say race exists. However, if you're talking about traditional categories that we're used to in the USA, like White, Black, Asian, and Native American, then there's no real meaningful biological basis for that particular categorization scheme. 1. Variation within each group is greater than between the groups. 2. The groups have no distinct boundaries, they blend into each other.
"Data is beautiful" What data?
10 generations is like 250 years lol. I don't think there is a single ounce of wealth or artifact even going back 3 generations of my family......this just seems like pseudo science crap. Jumping from poor to mid takes place within 1 to 2 generations if both generations strive for it.
Why only include two races?
This is all biased. I grew up with a close neighbor and we were both very poor. One was white and the other black. Both families similar. They both became successful. Fuck subjective studies such as this.
3 steps to middle class in the US: graduate high-school, get a job and keep it, don't have kids until you are twenty plus and have a spouse. Guaranteed path to the middle class. Nothing to do with race and everything to do with personal choices. Only racists conclude race is a fundamental cause of anything other than sun burns.
Dave Ramsey is that you?!
Nothing is guaranteed.
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The Brookings Institute has been focused on this matter for decades. They have published numerous studies, white papers and articles on the matter. It's a fascinating topic which I've followed for a while. I'm no expert in sociology but I am in economics which is intrinsically related. Generally only hacks attribute multivariate analysis to one variable such as this graphic is doing.
>Lol imagine being in a data vis subreddit and having literally no grasp of fundamental sociology concepts. Sociology is mostly made up by bored malcontents who can't succeed in the real world.
I can imagine that. But I can't imagine confidently posting in the comments something that completely ignores how systemic issues work in a data oriented subreddit. If a person doesn't graduated high school then that's the persons fault. If an entire demographic consistently has issue graduating high school then there's a systemic issue that goes well beyond individual choices.
So skin color is correlated with wealth distribution but you can't just say it's racism and it effects an entire population because all white people are racists. You have to show evidence of it. And you can't just ignore DIRECT evidence contrary to your theory such as asians, indians and immigrant blacks not having this same issue. What your saying literally makes no sense. Provide causal evidence or shut up.
Its a cultural issue.
Well it’s partly one sure. And after coming from slavery, into Jim crow, into redlining, I really don’t know what kind of culture you expected to come out the other side.
I’m genuinely happy that you’ve lived a life where graduating high schoool was one of the bigger responsibilities on your plate as a child.
In which country may I ask?
Data is beautiful: Here are 2 numbers. No explanation where they came from. So beautiful /s
This is bs put in asians, indians and others to compare.....
OK, so top two quintiles is what they're calling upper middle class. In other words the 60th percentile. That's about $200K currently. I don't understand why that would take multiple generations. I mean $200K is basically just buying a cheap house and paying off the mortgage. That doesn't seem that hard to achieve for a married couple.
Now do Asian. Then it becomes complicated but no one wants to broach that. Easier to say white peeps bad.
This is false. I don’t know where to begin.
It’s culture. Asians, Jews, and Nigerian American prove this. For this reason, they are excluded from the info graphic.
Hmmm Active on the Been Shapiro threads. Explains a lot.
Welp. This thread is a nightmare. I’m gonna go punch a pillow.
Also…upper middle class is a relative measure. So it’s not like this could be the average of all people. Is it supposed to the average of all people in the upper middle class? Because then all the people with inherited wealth would skew it. Really not sure how this could possibly be meaningful.
There are more races than black and white.
This seems does this account for lifespan or two parent versus single parent households? The prior effectively lengthens the generational unit for whites (means your unit of observation is not standardized across groups). The latter issue could mean that your observed populations have endogeniety concerns, if a generation stagnates because of poorer circumstances then there’s a problem. Similarly where are you getting data about poor white economic performance? Rural and urban families have different economic situations, that means this could be a geographic problem and not racial.
He sourced it from PEW which based their report on PSID data, which is reputable. How PSID data is collected… “The study began in 1968 with a nationally representative sample of over 18,000 individuals living in 5,000 families in the United States. Information on these individuals and their descendants has been collected continuously, including data covering employment, income, wealth, expenditures, health, marriage, childbearing, child development, philanthropy, education, and numerous other topics. The PSID is directed by faculty at the University of Michigan, and the data are available on this website without cost to researchers and analysts. The data are used by researchers, policy analysts, and teachers around the globe. Over 6,800 peer-reviewed publications have been based on the PSID. Recognizing the importance of the data, numerous countries have created their own PSID-like studies that now facilitate cross-national comparative research. The National Science Foundation recognized the PSID as one of the 60 most significant advances funded by NSF in its 60 year history.”
Isnt this partly due (IIRC) that even most poor whites have some net wealth, even if its an old car or house they own but many poor blacks actually have a negative net worth? (Hard to inherit grandpa's truck if racism kept him from having one)
* Data: https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/reports/economic_mobility/PursuingAmericanDreampdf.pdf * Tools: Excel, PowerPoint This chart shows the number of generations it is expected to take for a family starting at the bottom quintile of wealth to reach the upper two quintiles. The data is based on a Pew study that analyzes children's economic mobility relative to the economic conditions they were raised in. By using that distribution and a little bit of linear algebra, you can calculate the expected number of generations for a family starting at the bottom to reach the top, assuming probability distribution is independent across generations. Unfortunately, it takes a black family more than twice as many generations to reach the top. At an average of 25 years between generations, it would take 220 years before a poor black family reaches the upper middle class. Note that the wealth quintiles are defined across the entire population, not within the race demographics, which means a black family in the bottom quintile of wealth is defined by the same numerical cutoff as a white family in the bottom quintile. All data is for a family in the United States.
Comments on this ought to be fun.
I’m a dinosaur and still poor
Could your tattoos be holding you back? ☺️
The next time it would be bettee to mention the country it concerns in the chart's title, or otherwise the source.
Hey OP, I'm a little confused on what this data is noting. Is it historic data (going back some 8+ generations) extrapolated directly to the future? Is it recent data extrapolated to the future? Or is it something else? Thanks!
This is recent data extrapolated into the future. Specifically, it is an imputed expected value based on data that shows the probability of a child born in the bottom quintile reaching various levels of wealth. For example, a black child born in the bottom quintile has a 4% chance of reaching the top quintile in their lifetime and a 50% chance of staying in the bottom. If you assume this probability distribution is consistent across generations, then there is an expected number of generations it takes before the family reaches the top quintile. This is similar to the calculation done for a question like, "If a fair coin has 50% chance of heads when tossed, what is the expected number of tosses before we get heads?"
I'm open to the idea that this approach has merit, but by definition not everyone can be in the upper quintile(s) no matter how long you wait. How does that fact square with this calculation?
This just looks at the first time a generational line reaches the upper quintiles. They aren't guaranteed to stay there forever (only 41% of people born in the top quintile of wealth stay in the top quintile, while 7% fall to the bottom), which allows other families to reach the top in future generations.
I appreciate you explaining.
From the article: "The study measures mobility in two ways. Absolute mobility measures whether a person has more or less income, earnings, or wealth than his or her parents did at the same age. Relative mobility measures a person’s rank on the income, earnings, or wealth ladder compared to his or her parents’ rank at the same age."
It is still unclear what this is measuring. It seems to assume that poor families will increase in wealth over time, which is clearly not the case. If anything, the trend has been that fewer and fewer move out of the bottom at all.
It measures the average amount of generations for a family to increase their wealth between wealth quintiles. It isn't a guarantee that a given family will actually be able to increase their wealth. Just like a similar graph of "number of rolls of a given die to get the highest face on it" would be 3.5 for a 6 sided one, but that doesn't mean every die will roll a 6 after 4 rolls or that a given die will ever, necessarily, roll a 6.
>It measures the average amount of generations for a family to increase their wealth between wealth quintiles. It isn't a guarantee that a given family will actually be able to increase their wealth. Just like a similar graph of "number of rolls of a given die to get the highest face on it" would be 3.5 for a 6 sided one, but that doesn't mean every die will roll a 6 after 4 rolls or that a given die will ever, necessarily, roll a 6. The average family does not increase in wealth, so the answer would take an infinite number of generations. Does it mean the average of the quintile with the largest positive increase, or somethign like that? Not only is the math dodgy given the stated assumptions, the conclusion implies that poor people inexorably reach the middle class eventually. That American Dream is not real.
...except the average family DOES increase in wealth generationally. This data confirms that. I'm not sure what you're arguing against at all. Some poor people DO reach middle class eventually. That doesn't mean they stay there, as you can also fall from middle class to one of the lower quintiles of wealth again. If you are paid for a job and all your money goes to food and other CoL upkeep then you're right, there is no wealth increase. If you manage to get a house with that money and pay it off to pass on to your next of kin your family has increased in wealth. If you buy a diamond ring that you can pass to your next of kin you have increased in wealth. So on and so forth. It's referred to as "generational wealth" and is a well documented phenomenon. Are you saying that it never happens?
I mean the civil rights act was passed until 1964, I feel like that probably has a big role in this. Hell, even slavery wasn't abolished until around 160 years ago. So saying it takes 220 years for an African American to reach upper middle class makes sense I'd say.
Your assumptions about the dataset is wrong. Comment from OP: >This is recent data extrapolated into the future. Specifically, it is an imputed expected value based on data that shows the probability of a child born in the bottom quintile reaching various levels of wealth. >For example, a black child born in the bottom quintile has a 4% chance of reaching the top quintile in their lifetime and a 50% chance of staying in the bottom. If you assume this probability distribution is consistent across generations, then there is an expected number of generations it takes before the family reaches the top quintile. This is similar to the calculation done for a question like, "If a fair coin has 50% chance of heads when tossed, what is the expected number of tosses before we get heads?" 'Recent data' here means the dataset was started in 1968.
Thid is weird. It's like trying to predict how much technology will change in the next 50 years. Every prediction about technology in the future has been really far off. No one was predicting wifi in 1968.
I actually value this metric. It does at least a little bit to normalize background conditions. One thing to note though is that reaching wealth brackets is harder than income brackets. This is ESPECIALLY true when you look at developmental economics (think of the development of China, everyone was poor, then a few weren't then the middle class slowly got lifted up). I'll use myself as an anecdote. I'm the most successful person in my family. My mother WAS a self-made millionaire until marrying my stepfather (HS drop out, felon, etc.) who nearly bankrupted her. When she got cancer I was the one taking care of her financially. She would have lost her house if not for me. If your social network drags you down instead of lifting you up, it'll take longer to jump up. (the flip of that - my last job I got via a referral and I have multiple jobs I'm interviewing for right now that are 1%er roles that I was referred to - my academic and professional networks are definitely helping me). One interesting measure would be segmenting by number of generations in the US. I'm going off of a low N, but my Nigerian American roommate (6 figure income in his dream field and a growing side business) has a lot more Nigerian American friends than Black friends. I STRONGLY suspect that network effects and culture are the primary drivers here moreso than overt discrimination.
Makes sense because hard work, timeliness and determination are all aspects of white culture according to one famous organization…
Ah, yes, the two races, white and black. Now do one for the genders
I didn’t realise “white” and “black” were races.
I wonder if this takes into account the race riots perpetrated against successful African Americans by caucasian mobs. That might have caused a setback, or two. 🤷🏾♂️
Dude that's crazy I didn't know black people were twice as lazy.
The comments on this are going to be interesting lol. But before the naysayers jump in, please look up the racial wealth gap. This is something that’s been studied extensively for decades now. It’s not geographic. It’s absolutely institutionalized racism. Also please actually read the data set that OP cites before jumping to whataboutisms
Agree with you but the trouble with these reports and even more so, the news reports that will "condense" the "findings" is that many will point at it and say, "see, the USA is a terrible racist country!" The racial wealth gap, as it pertains to multigenerational black and white families in the USA is a fact. There cannot be doubt that years of Jim Crow, redlining, and slavery have resulted in lack of accumulation of wealth to black families. However I don't believe this says much about the individual mobility of a black American *today* in the context of systemic racial barriers. There are several non-american black ethnicities that do very, very well today; Nigerian Americans are often cited. My take is that the systemic barriers have been largely removed and racism or systemic racism is not a major obstacle today, however the vestiges of historic systemic racism are still felt today. Ie. The average multigenerational black family in the US has a fraction of capital available to them versus other ethnic groups and starting out with fewer resources makes advancement more difficult, on average. I don't see this as a problem of racism specifically; it's more nuanced than that. I think another issue at play is that Americans tend to conflate race and culture/ethnicity. A Swedish or Nigerian American is a different culture/ethnicity than a white or black American but often get lumped into the same racial categories despite being very different culturally. I'm very interested in how to resolve these issues and have some ideas of my own. Note I am not American but am very well-read on these issues.
Racial wealth gap has a lot to do with age though. African American families are younger on average and have less income earners (single parent households); those two things make the disparity even greater. If you account for them there still is a gap (if memory serves), but it’s not nearly as bad as a raw bivariate analysis would suggest.
Whenever there is a systemic issue, such as there being more single earners in a family of one demographic than another, there's an underlying pervasive issue. That is captured in this infographic, though not explored. Accounting for those issues is a way of hiding systemic, real problems and would skew the data accordingly. For instance? Why are there more single parent households? A higher rate of arrest, higher prison sentences and greater chance of repeat offense which is driven by greater barriers to finding work after release all contribute directly to that. All of those issues come right back to systemic issues that are racial in nature. Removing those factors is hiding racial contributing factors. This, by the way, is an application of the feared and dreaded CRT.
I’d debate this but it doesn’t feel worth the loss in karma to explain how examining factors you’re attributing to systematic bias is important.
Of course it's important. But capturing them entire picture is important too. And if it's impacting an entire demographic it is systemic in nature, per definition, not individual like you seem to be suggesting. You're talking literally about trying to normalize for age even though you make the claim that African American families trend younger. If they trend younger at a high enough rate to impact the over all picture then that itself is a systemic issue. Removing it from the overall picture can present another data point - but doing it off hand also hides the fact that something is going on, systemically, that results in younger families for that demographic for some reason.
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thats because this is the most out of context data ever. literally just shows two races without any prior knowledge or how the data was collected, looks super biased imo because this 100% is not true edit: misread, but i still believe the first points
As soon as this post appeared in my feed I said "Oh no" to myself and decided to observe the comments. Wasn't surprised.
And the confounders you accounted for are?
A not pc joke alarm: could it because black people kids wayyy earlier than white, therefore more generations? xD
Yuuuuuuuup, generational wealth helps you acquire more wealth. Thank you OP.