Report Finds U.S. Racial Wealth Gap Still Growing at an Alarming Pace

Friday, September 15, 2017

Report Finds U.S. Racial Wealth Gap Still Growing at an Alarming Pace

According to a new study coauthored by two Washington, D.C. nonprofit think tanks, Prosperity Now (formerly CFED) and the Institute for Policy Studies, America’s already large racial wealth gap, far from narrowing, will grow ever wider in the years to come, absent policy change.

The two institutes’ joint report bears the ominous title “The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Wealth Gap is Hollowing Out America’s Middle Class,” a clear riff on George Orwell’s classic The Road to Wigan Pier. It projects that, if current household wealth trends (as have occurred between 1983 and 2013) continue indefinitely into the future, by 2053 the median Black household would have a net worth of zero—meaning that at least half of Black households would have a negative net worth, with Latinx households hitting the same negative threshold 20 years afterward. By contrast, white households are projected to see their wealth increase...

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