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Comment by joshuanapoli | Hacker News Reader

> the gains began to be shared more widely across society. The Black and Hispanic unemployment rates reached record lows, and the differentials between these rates and the white unemployment rate narrowed to their lowest levels on record.

I didn't know this, and it runs against the "growing wealth inequality" narrative. Or maybe it's possible that wealth inequality is increasingly driven by factors other than race.

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>it runs against the "growing wealth inequality" narrative

There are two things happening at the same time. The bottom is doing a little better than they were (lower poverty rate, lower unemployment, education gains, and even income improvement). At the same time, the top is doing amazing. So you get two different narratives that are both true.

There is growing inequality.

The bottom is doing better.

You shouldn't ignore either one. If you fixate too much on inequality, you can push the bottom back down (everyone has nothing is very equal). If you ignore the inequality, society starts to crack.

Shorter:

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting richer.

But I assumes states and cities are getting into debt

Er, maybe "the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting slightly less poor" is more accurate.

https://tomdehnel.com/what-is-russell-conjugation/

Do you think that communicating the significant, material difference between the relative increases among the two groups is not important?

It's perfectly good topic to talk about!

Arguing about what emotionally charged wording to use to describe it is not a discussion about facts though.

The poor can make rent and save a few bucks while the rich have another billion in stock.

The report clearly says:

> the differentials between these rates and the white unemployment rate narrowed to their lowest levels on record

Which means that wealth inequality (difference between top and bottom) is NOT increasing, but is decreasing. This contradicts your claim that the top is getting ahead and increasing the gap to the bottom.

So yes, it does run against the "growing wealth inequality" narrative.

Employment and wealth are related, but still separate things. It is orthogonal to the "growing wealth inequality" narrative, not in contradiction. Lowering the gap in unemployment may or may not reduce the wealth gap.

You’re interpreting too strong of a relationship between employment and inequality as if they were inverses of each other. Assume the rate at which top earners are accumulating wealth exceeds the rate of wealth accumulation for the poor. This presents a scenario in which employment is increasing but so is inequality, because low-earners are not realizing gains at the same, or faster, rate than top-earners.

There are a number of reasons they are not contradictory.. but the most simplistic would work like this:

Day 1: John has $10 and Joe has $100

Day 5: John has $11 and Joe has $250

Day 100: John has $15 and Joe has $1000

They certainly both have more than before, but one of them is much better off (especially if there is some form of inflation in play).

Also, blue collar wages have been largely stagnant or declining when measured against inflation (a very important point) since ~1980 while conversely white collar job incomes have been ballooning against the same measure. In particular, Executive compensation is utterly off the charts comparatively. When tax discount structures that vastly favor investment income over real wages is taken into account, the gains become even more stark (that is, the amount of income that can be retained v must be spent or is taxed).

Employment rate, not wealth inequality. And if most white people are employed, then you'd expect that most of the employment gains (i.e. increases in percent who are employed) would be in groups that were largely unemployed to before.

That makes sense; it's just impossible for the unemployment rate to be so low without leveling across groups that had high unemployment.

Yes, and conversely, during recessions, the poor get it worse. If you look at black poverty rates for the last ~60 years, it has declined overall, from ~55% to ~20%. But you can see every recession or economic dip in the graph as a bump in poverty rate.

Feels like to me as well that "having a job" and "having a decent life" are highly uncorrelated in the united states these days.

I feel that the media narrative is race is what drives inequity, but it certainly feels more like race is just a convenient scapegoat. In the end, it's all about concentration of power.

I guess that any kind of bail-out (of stocks, or banks, or owners of real estate, or whatever) will inevitably help to sustain and increase concentration of power. If nature took its course, then control of whatever aspect of the world crashed would diffuse across a new set of owners as it rebuilds.

The hint on the wealth inequality is this:

"In earlier decades when the Phillips curve was steeper, inflation tended to rise noticeably in response to a strengthening labor market"

It doesn't really matter much to the market if people are employed or not. Purchasing power is not vested in the people with a W-2.

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