by Christopher Ingraham in the Washington Post, 3/14/19

Few data points more clearly illustrate how decades of discrimination affected black Americans than the racial wealth gap. As of 2016, the typical black family had a net worth of $17,100, roughly one-tenth the $171,000 accumulated by a white household, federal research shows.

Economists tend to trace the staggering divide to the nation’s long history of bigotry against its black citizens, starting with slavery. But decades of discrimination after the Civil War played a role, too, from the overt racism of Jim Crow laws to the more subtle forms of biasbuilt into the New Deal, the G.I. Bill and many of the nation’s economic and criminal justice policies of the 20th century.

But there’s less agreement on the exact mechanisms by which these policies contributed to such disparate financial outcomes. Some economists say it comes down to inheritance, which allows families to build on the gains of preceding generations. Other researchers contend the difference can be found in the types of financial assets held by black and white families.

But in February, research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland concluded that differences in black and white wealth can almost entirely be explained by disparities in black and white incomes. If confirmed, the finding could help lawmakers better understand which policies would be most effective at closing the racial wealth gap.

“We find that the income gap is the primary driver behind the wealth gap and that it is large enough to explain the persistent difference in wealth accumulation,” the authors write. “The key policy implication of our work is that policies designed to speed the closing of the racial wealth gap would do well to focus on closing the racial income gap.”

Wealth, or net worth, is a measure of a family’s assets — such as a home, retirement accounts, and money in the bank — minus its debts, which usually include things like mortgages, credit card debt and consumer loans. If income is a flow of money into a household, wealth is the household’s stock of financial assets. Typically economists view this stock as growing over time, as households save money that they don’t need to spend.

But in order to save money, you have to be bringing in enough income to cover all your expenses. And black families tend to earn much less than white ones: In 2016, for instance, the typical black family earned $35,400, while the typical white household brought in $61,200. Those differences persist even when you control for other factors, like education, that can have a significant effect on earnings. In 2014, for instance, white college-educated families earned about $24,000 more per year than black college-educated families, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Cleveland Fed economists constructed a sophisticated economic model capable of projecting changes in household wealth over decades, factoring in things like inheritances, income and financial portfolio composition. That model suggests that, given what we know about black and white finances today, it would take approximately 260 years for the wealth of the average black family to achieve 90 percent of the wealth of the average white family.

“We find that one factor accounts for the racial wealth gap almost entirely by itself: the racial income gap," they wrote.

One vivid illustration of this: If black and white incomes had been similar starting in 1962, their model shows, the black-white wealth gap would have all but disappeared by 2007. They found that tweaking other model parameters, like inheritances and investment composition, had a much smaller overall effect.
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To read the whole article, https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/03/14/new-explanation-stubborn-persistence-racial-wealth-gap/

By Congressperson Earl Blumenauer in civileats.com. posted 1/30/19   

Our food system and environment are inexorably linked. What we grow–and how we grow it–has a tremendous impact on our land, water, and climate. And right now, our climate is in crisis. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the gold standard for climate science, implores the world to cut greenhouse gas pollution by half in the next 12 years, and eliminate them entirely by 2050, to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate disruption on people, economies, and the natural world. We must build solid, lasting bonds between the climate justice movement and the movement to reform our food system. This starts with a Green New Deal.

The Green New Deal is an incredibly powerful social, economic, and environmental effort to invest in clean energy jobs and infrastructure. While the exact details have yet to be worked out, underlying this movement is a series of policy proposals to stop investing in fossil fuel development and redirect these resources toward decarbonizing the economy and making it more equitable.

Fueled by immense social power, it is designed to build on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s sweeping New Deal that invested in natural resource conservation, built massive public works projects, and reformed financial institutions in order to pull the country out of the economic crisis of the Great Depression. Today, the Green New Deal is intended to make massive investments and reforms on the same scale in order to pull the world out of the climate crisis.

But the Green New Deal won’t have the impact we need it to without a fundamental change to the way we produce our food. As of 2016, American agriculture contributed over 9% of US greenhouse gas pollution, largely due to emissions from livestock and poor soil management. If we are to reach the climate goals set by the IPCC, the food system must play a key role in reducing these greenhouse gas emissions and even sequestering carbon—actually taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere—through regenerative agricultural practices.   

(to read the whole article, https://civileats.com/2019/01/30/a-green-new-deal-must-include-food-and-farming