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Aug 1, 2022 · T he wealth gap between White and Black Americans is nearly as large today as it was in the 1950s. In Wealth of Two Nations: The US Racial Wealth Gap, 1860–2020 (NBER Working Paper 30101), Ellora Derenoncourt , Chi Hyun Kim , Moritz Kuhn , and Moritz Schularick construct a time series of the ratio of White-to-Black per capita wealth spanning a century and a half.
- Evolution of The Racial Wealth Gap
- Unequal Initial Wealth, Unequal Wealth Accumulation
- A Widening Gap: The Role of Capital Gains
- Why Wealth Matters
- Endnote
Tracing 150 years of the racial wealth gap1reveals rapid early progress followed by frustrating stagnation (Figure 1).
The next step in the economists' research is to analyze the causes of the racial wealth gap. To do this, they engage in a thought experiment: What if Black and White Americans started with the radically different levels of wealth in 1870 that they did in real life, but their wealth accumulation rates were identical after that? The resulting wealth ...
Now that income convergence has stalled, the difference in the capital gains rate experienced by Black and White households is the main factor pushing their wealth apart. The role of capital gains is particularly important here. The high rate of return to capital holdings over the last 40 years—economic parlance for “stocks have really gone up a lo...
The distribution of wealth in the United States comes under frequent scrutiny because of how skewedit is—and because wealth is a determinant of social and economic outcomes far beyond what someone can buy. “Wealthier families are far better positioned to finance elite independent school and college education, access capital to start a business, fin...
1The economists actually compare Black wealth to non-Black wealth—that is, the average wealth among all groups except Black Americans—because the data does not allow them to separate out the wealth of other racial/ethnic groups. As a check, they compare their estimate of non-Black wealth to an estimate of White wealth in the periods 1860–1880 and 1...
The rise of the modern state in western Europe was based on the accumulation of wealth by means of exploiting human labor and displacing millions of subsistence producers from their lands. The armies that did this work benefited from technological innovations that allowed the development of more effective weapons of death and destruction.
Jul 4, 2022 · Large and persistent wealth gaps between Black and white Americans have attracted considerable attention from researchers and policymakers. This column presents a new long-run time series of the per capita wealth gap, from before the Civil War to 2020. A key finding is that severe racial differences in initial conditions after Emancipation have contributed greatly to today’s stalled progress ...
The racial wealth gap is the largest of the economic disparities between Black and white Americans, with a white-to-Black per capita wealth ratio of 6 to 1. It is also among the most persistent.
Sep 18, 2023 · In a speech to Congress in 1920, U.S. Senator Selden Spencer (R-MO) lauded the amount of wealth accumulated by Black Americans since the Civil War, stating that it “surpassed any progress under any like circumstances in the history of the world.” 1 One hundred years after this sanguine assessment, the racial wealth gap remains the largest of the economic gaps between Black and white ...
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Sep 6, 2023 · The racial wealth gap in the United States hasn’t changed in 70 years. CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar Ellora Derenoncourt discusses how the gap came to be and what can be learned from history to eliminate it. In 1860 before the abolition of slavery in the United States, the wealth gap between Black and white Americans was 60 to one.
