The Average U.S. Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Match Average White Family’s Wealth

If current economic trends hold, the average U.S. black household would need 228 years to accumulate as much wealth as its white counterpart possesses today, meaning significant policy interventions are needed to close the gap.

For the average Latino family, it would take 84 years.

Joshua Holland reports at The Nation:

Those are the key findings of a new study of the racial wealth-gap released this week by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Corporation For Economic Development (CFED). They looked at trends in household wealth from 1983 to 2013—a 30-year period that captured the rise of Reaganomics, expanded international trade and two major financial crashes fueled by bubbles in the tech sector and housing prices. The authors found that the average wealth of white households increased by 84 percent during those three decades, three times the gains African-American families saw and 1.2 times the rate of growth for Latino families.

To put that in perspective, the wealthiest Americans—members of the Forbes 400 list—saw their net worths increase by 736 percent during that period, on average.

If those trends persist for another 30 years, the average white family’s net worth will grow by $18,000 per year, but black and Hispanic households would only see theirs grow by $750 and $2,250 per year, respectively.

Continue reading here.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.