dagblog - Comments for ""Black People Are Not All ‘Living in Hell’""

Humorous perverse paradox

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 07:17:43 +0000

Humorous perverse paradox (hypocrisy?) for Hillary's string of wins in the South - "winning those states is as significant as winning Guam" as Tim Robbins summed it up. We talk about the blind spot of ignoring midwest semi-rural whites, but then attack worrying about a bloc of >9 million black voters because they're in states that are less competitive, presumably never to be in play:

Florida - 113,000 diff (1.2%)
North Carolina - 173,000 (3.7%)
Georgia - 211,000 (5.1%)
Mississippi - 215,000 (18%)
South Carolina - 300,000 (14%)
Louisiana - 398,000 (19.7%)

The first 3 could flip in the foreseeable future. As for the last 3, it may seem like a longshot, but we're STILL FUCKING TALKING ABOUT WEST VIRGINIA WHERE WE LOST BY 42%!!!

That's a much bigger margin than Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas, all in the high 20's. I imagine if we show up there talking about a $30 billion bailout plan like coal pandering for Appalachia we'd get some ears. But no - it's always the "Heartland".

I looked at regions - change

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 06:56:47 +0000

In reply to Income of top 5% of white

I looked at regions - change in mean, 2015 dollars:

NE up $2.5K
Midwest down$1.5K
South up $2K
West up $4K

Note that buying power for the southern increase is probably greater than say buying power in California hit by high housing prices. And of course blacks suffering from the same downturns in the Midwest - but a lot more live in the booming south.

Yeah, the $253K vs. $364K was closer than I expected. Not ideal, but do we live in anything close the ideal?

Income of top 5% of white

rmrd0000 — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 04:59:55 +0000

In reply to "Black People Are Not All ‘Living in Hell’"

Income of top 5% of white family incomes $364K. For African-American upper 5% $253K.

Movin on up ????

For those non-subscribers

artappraiser — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 21:32:19 +0000

In reply to "Black People Are Not All ‘Living in Hell’"

For those non-subscribers reluctant to spend a click-through on it, it's very well sourced, this is an excerpt of roughly the first 1/4:

Contrary to Donald Trump’s indiscriminate portrayal of African-Americans as “living in hell,” the black upper middle class is ascending the economic ladder at a faster rate than its white counterpart.

Scholars have begun to focus their attention on this phenomenon. William Julius Wilson, a sociologist at Harvard and the author of “The Truly Disadvantaged,” is working on a book about upward social mobility among African-Americans. In an email, he wrote me:

One of the most significant changes in recent decades is the remarkable gains in income among more affluent blacks. When we adjust for inflation to 2014 dollars, the percentage of black Americans earning at least $75,000 more than doubled from 1970 to 2014, to 21 percent. Those making $100,000 or more almost quadrupled to 13 percent (in contrast white Americans saw a less striking increase, from 11 to 26 percent).

In an NBER paper issued in November 2016, Patrick Bayer, an economist at Duke, and Kerwin Charles, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, published comparable findings, reporting that

higher quantile black men have experienced substantial gains in both relative earnings levels and their positional rank in the white earnings distribution.

In a summary of their work, Bayer and Charles made the same point more succinctly: “Over the past 75 years, the gap in economic rank” — that is, the gap between blacks and whites — “has narrowed sharply among men at the top of the earnings ladder.”

Bayer and Charles conclude that the improvement in earnings for upper-income black men have had an uneven impact on African- American communities generally: [....]