top or bottom?

“A white child born into the upper-income quintile was five times more likely to stay there than fall to the bottom. A black child born into the upper-income quintile was as likely to fall to the bottom as to remain rich.”

The federal government collects a lot of information, what Michael Lewis calls, “big pools of raw facts.” In his book on the career civil service, Lewis profiles people who rarely get any publicity, who aren’t paid a whole lot, but who regularly tackle incredibly difficult problems, people who sometimes get amazing things done. During the Obama administration DJ Patil was tasked with making that “big pool of raw facts” available to the public, especially “people who could make new sense of it.” 

As one example Lewis talks about what was learned concerning the distribution of wealth in this country. “A team of researchers at Stanford … used newly accessible data from the Internal Revenue Service … to study Americans across generations and the census data [let them] compare [Americans] by race, gender, or whichever trait [the researchers] wished to isolate.” The data showed that younger generations aren’t improving their lives the way older generations did. “Every year, the economic future of an American child was a bit less bright. And the big reason was not lower rates of economic growth but the increasingly unequal distribution of money.” The rich were getting richer — and that trend only seems to be getting faster. 

Sounds familiar, mostly. The lines about race that I quote at the top of this post surprised me, however. Yes, I knew advantages are disproportionately distributed — that is, white people get more of them. But a rich family has advantages, whatever the family’s skin color. Money gives you opportunities, connections, education, a cushion in emergencies. Whether or not that’s the same across all races, it can’t be so very different, right? Money is money. That any rich kid could be as likely to become poor (“fall to the bottom”) as to remain rich strikes me as hard to believe. There are quintiles in between rich and poor, after all. Wouldn’t a rich kid — even a rich black kid — be more likely to drop a quintile or two or three rather than drop all the way to the bottom fifth? I mean, dropping from the top to the bottom — that’s a long way to fall. Still, the data sounds alarming — such a dramatic difference in lived experience for blacks versus whites, even among the wealthiest.  

source:

The Fifth Risk

by Michael Lewis

2018. W. W. Norton & Co., New York