Today’s conservative (PoC) wunderkind is one Coleman Hughes, an undergraduate at Columbia, now published in Quillette, the new online journal of the philosophy of resentment. (Waiting on a peer-reviewed journal of economic history wouldn’t be the fast track to fame.) Hughes’s task is the refutation of recent scholarship on the breathtaking gap in the wealth of white and black American families, even controlling for current income.
He takes as his target recent scholarship that emphasizes the role of slavery, racism, and legal financial discrimination, singling out Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Color of Money, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations”.
Hughes gets one thing right: “But statistics don’t interpret themselves, and the wealth gap is no exception.” In a paper with a number of holes, let’s just look (in this diary) at the arithmetic mistake that turns its argument on its head.
The second factor offered as an explanation for the wealth gap is the exclusion of blacks from a set of New Deal policies designed to promote homeownership, income growth, and wealth accrual…
Although it is true that the median income of white men more than tripled between 1939 and 1960 (rising from 1,112 dollars to 5,137 dollars), the median income of black men more than quintupled (rising from 460 dollars to 3,075 dollars). Black women, too, saw their incomes grow at a faster rate than white women over the same timespan. [footnote deleted, italics original, bold added]
As Hughes realizes at the beginning of his essay, wealth is a function of accrued savings. The italicized rates of increase are mathematically irrelevant to accumulation of wealth. The numbers that matter are in bold, and they show that in 1939, an average white family had $652 more dollars to save, while in 1960, the white family had an extra $2062 to save. That is, while black salaries increased at a faster rate, they were even further behind white salaries in 1960: in terms of wealth, not only were black families losing ground every year, they were losing more ground each year at the end of the time period. Hughes must misunderstand this very badly, since he repeats the meaningless rate comparison for black women.
For those of you technically inclined, he has examined the rate of change of the salary series (tells us nothing about wealth) instead of their sums (tells us black families fell far behind during this period of Jim Crow, no open housing law, and overt discrimination in mortgage lending). Maybe Columbia should put an elementary statistics book into its Core Curriculum.