Some of the well-known systemic failures failures that contributes to a lack of economic mobility across generations are:
- as a consequence of suburbanization and racial practices like redlining, poor people live in poor neighborhoods. In many places, schools are funded by local taxes, so poor neighborhoods get less school funding, resulting in a poorer education
- those racial practices kept many black families from access to federally backed mortgages and access to properties in more prosperous neighborhoods. This made housing more expensive for black families, and reduced equity buildup that could be used to help the next generation. This, on top of earlier Jim Crow restrictions and long-term general discrimination against blacks, has reduced the upward economic mobility of poor black families.
- racism embedded in the legal system has resulted in a higher relative percentage of black men in jail, relative to white. As one example, the War on Drugs was started in part because blacks and hippies used heroin and marijuana, respectively, and Nixon considered them his enemies. This is part of the long-term change, called the Southern Strategy, for Republicans to gain support from those who didn't like the social changes, including the Civil Rights movement.
- the owners of capital have made it increasingly hard for workers to make a good living. This includes passing laws like so-called "right to work" (for less) which make it harder to unionize and exercise the collective bargaining power that would be possible in a free labor market. As Piketty argued in "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", "when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability." A consequence of this is that the poor stay poor.
- A family which has little money may not have a long-term stability in housing or food. For example, children may have to rotate among friends and family for a place to stay, or may not have enough food to eat. Long-term stress has a negative effect on one's life.
Much has been written on this topic, with a large number of studies. Since you apparently don't seem to know much of the topic to give even a hint of a counter-argument, perhaps you don't know enough to simply write "it's true".
> Much has been written on this topic, with a large number of studies. Since you apparently don't seem to know much of the topic to give even a hint of a counter-argument, perhaps you don't know enough to simply write "it's true".
The problem isn't that I haven't looked at these explanations. It's that they're more ideological than factual in nature, wouldn't explain intergenerational poverty, or (as in the case of incarceration) just plain wrong. What you perceive as ignorance on my part is simply a reflection of things you "know" that aren't true.
It is much easier for me to believe that your contrariness is "more ideological than factual in nature", especially as you haven't given any refutations.
My point about the lack of equity comes from Richard Rothstein's “The Color of Law”, concerning how the systemic discrimination against black people in housing before the Fair Housing Act of 1968 contributes to the continued lack of wealth among black people today. How is his thesis incorrect?
> Today African-American incomes on average are about 60 percent of average white incomes. But African-American wealth is about 5 percent of white wealth. Most middle-class families in this country gain their wealth from the equity they have in their homes. So this enormous difference between a 60 percent income ratio and a 5 percent wealth ratio is almost entirely attributable to federal housing policy implemented through the 20th century.
> African-American families that were prohibited from buying homes in the suburbs in the 1940s and '50s and even into the '60s, by the Federal Housing Administration, gained none of the equity appreciation that whites gained. So ... the Daly City development south of San Francisco or Levittown or any of the others in between across the country, those homes in the late 1940s and 1950s sold for about twice national median income. They were affordable to working-class families with an FHA or VA mortgage. African-Americans were equally able to afford those homes as whites but were prohibited from buying them. Today those homes sell for $300,000 [or] $400,000 at the minimum, six, eight times national median income. ...
> So in 1968 we passed the Fair Housing Act that said, in effect, "OK, African-Americans, you're now free to buy homes in Daly City or Levittown" ... but it's an empty promise because those homes are no longer affordable to the families that could've afforded them when whites were buying into those suburbs and gaining the equity and the wealth that followed from that.
> The white families sent their children to college with their home equities; they were able to take care of their parents in old age and not depend on their children. They're able to bequeath wealth to their children. None of those advantages accrued to African-Americans, who for the most part were prohibited from buying homes in those suburbs.
- as a consequence of suburbanization and racial practices like redlining, poor people live in poor neighborhoods. In many places, schools are funded by local taxes, so poor neighborhoods get less school funding, resulting in a poorer education
- those racial practices kept many black families from access to federally backed mortgages and access to properties in more prosperous neighborhoods. This made housing more expensive for black families, and reduced equity buildup that could be used to help the next generation. This, on top of earlier Jim Crow restrictions and long-term general discrimination against blacks, has reduced the upward economic mobility of poor black families.
- racism embedded in the legal system has resulted in a higher relative percentage of black men in jail, relative to white. As one example, the War on Drugs was started in part because blacks and hippies used heroin and marijuana, respectively, and Nixon considered them his enemies. This is part of the long-term change, called the Southern Strategy, for Republicans to gain support from those who didn't like the social changes, including the Civil Rights movement.
- the owners of capital have made it increasingly hard for workers to make a good living. This includes passing laws like so-called "right to work" (for less) which make it harder to unionize and exercise the collective bargaining power that would be possible in a free labor market. As Piketty argued in "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", "when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability." A consequence of this is that the poor stay poor.
- A family which has little money may not have a long-term stability in housing or food. For example, children may have to rotate among friends and family for a place to stay, or may not have enough food to eat. Long-term stress has a negative effect on one's life.
Much has been written on this topic, with a large number of studies. Since you apparently don't seem to know much of the topic to give even a hint of a counter-argument, perhaps you don't know enough to simply write "it's true".