Reviews for Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America

The average rating for Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-01-24 00:00:00 Georges Icke This is an interesting, if dry, look at the influence of wealth on educational, professional, family, and other sociological outcomes. Conflating income and wealth has long been a pet peeve of mine, so this book, which is principally focused on entangling these two things (the author focuses on racial differences, but the income/wealth distinction has other implications, too), resonated with me. The most compelling finding is that after controlling for wealth levels, income is not significant in predicting educational outcomes, and that racial differences disappear completely. This research is the first chapter of the book, which I enjoyed immensely. The rest of the book wasn't as compelling to me--and I wondered about collinearity issues in his discussion of which types of assets influence outcomes (although possibly this is addressed in the footnotes, which I didn't go through in detail). As well, I thought the author's argument against individual retirement accounts--that they would limit workers' ability to bargain for wages--was very weak. There are reason to prefer pensions over individual accounts (not least that people tend to over-transact, and overpay for fund management), but workers' bargaining power is a function of labor market tightness/looseness, not the structure of retirement accounts. The author introduces some interesting research on the influence of neighborhoods on family outcomes, and the urban/suburban distinction; however, these findings (of suburban neighborhoods being safer/whiter/higher-income) seem outdated now, 20 years later. This would be interesting to revisit.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-10-30 00:00:00 Laurie Gross In a nutshell, this book is about the effect wealth (not just income) has in determining who will finish school, who will find steady work, and who will (or won't) be poor. It demonstrates how difficult it can be to determine causation, and to tease out the roles played by race or class. Sometimes the two are pretty damn near inextricably linked. Basically, the amount of wealth your parents have seems to be a pretty decent predictor of how much wealth you will have. (And black parents generally tend to have less wealth than white parents.) Hence, the cycle continues. I wish I could do a longer review, but I have more books to read right now than I have time to read them. I'm barely keeping my head above water this semester.