Thanks for sharing, interesting stuff for sure. I read the whole thing and a couple of the articles cited. After reading it I don't think they say white high school drop outs make less than blacks with college degrees, they are saying the "wealth" is more which the study focuses a lot on the parents having money and passing it down in inheritances etc.
"Hamilton et al. (2015) point out that Black households with college-educated heads have 33 percent less wealth than White households headed by high school dropouts."
But that doesn't mean the thought isn't true, just not that glaring. Education still matters regardless of race but there are clear discrepancies in lifetime earnings
"A Pew study (Pew Research Center, 2014) finds that among Millennials (ages 25 to 32 in 2013), those with a bachelor’s degree had median earnings of $45,500, more than $17,000 more than their peers with only a high school diploma. Lifetime earnings for those with a college degree are expected to be about $1 million more than for those with a high school diploma (Carnevale, Rose, and Cheah, 2011; Day and Newburger, 2002). While the million-dollar return from college is true for all racial groups, total expected earnings for Blacks and Latinos are lower than for Whites and Asians at all education levels. Across the education spectrum, lifetime earnings of Latinos and Blacks are 34 percent and 23 percent lower, respectively, than those of Whites. Even among those with bachelor’s and advanced degrees, lifetime earnings of Blacks and Latinos are 20 percent or more lower than those of similarly educated Whites—a gap of approximately $480,000 (Carnevale et al., 2011)."
That study reinforces my earlier point that the biggest issue for lower income demographics is the inability to save money and spend it when you have it.
Another huge issue and I would love to hear your thoughts on this is the idea of "abandoning your family" once you do exit the cycle of poverty. According to this study that is the largest reason black people are unable to generate significant wealth because they're taking care of everyone else.
"Specifically, during the Great Recession, college-educated White families lost only 16 percent of their net wealth compared with 32 percent for White families without a college degree, while college-educated Black families lost nearly 60 percent of their net wealth compared with 37 percent for less-educated Black families. One possible explanation for this non-intuitive finding lies in studies showing that extended kin networks are important avenues for wealth transmission in the Black community; that is, Blacks who have “made it” into the middle class are still tied to family members struggling to get by and provide loans and other monetary support to them (Chiteji and Hamilton, 2005). O’Brien (2012) tested this hypothesis and found that middle- class Blacks are indeed more likely to provide informal financial assistance to extended networks, depleting their own wealth accumulation capacity through “negative social capital.” Thus, it is possible that college-educated Blacks transferred a significant amount of wealth to family networks"
And this isn't just a black thing. I've seen it in my own family. My father is the only person in his family to have a college degree and he didn't get it until he was 40 years old. My uncles / aunts are alcoholics, drug addicts, and in and out of jail. My cousins are stuck in the cycle of poverty as well with multiple kids and no education past high school. One of my female cousins disappeared 3 years ago and we believe got forced into sex trafficking.
The only reason we made it out of the that cycle was my father met my mom and they decided to cut themselves off from that part of the family. They would send money for food and buy school clothes for my cousins but at the end of the day they had to make it for themselves because no one else in the family wanted to do anything to make themselves better.
Does it suck? Sure, but I think the black culture of taking care results in no one being taken care of.