Re: income & race

[bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rakesh Bhandari)]

There was a similar report on the equalisation of income for those
arbitrary categories of ethno-racial groups in the New York Times, Sept 30
1997. I seem not to have saved it.

It wouldn't be the claim that black gains explain white losses, that better
paid whites are being downsized for cheaper blacks?

At any rate, there are the usual worries: there are biases in the sampling
of the black population; income equalisation is at the very least not
accompanied by wealth equalisation (especially given the low value of any
owned housing stock in still massively segregated neighborhoods); absolute
and relative black income 'gains' result from more hours worked by black
households.

At the same time,  this data shows that inequality in terms of the top and
bottom quintile groups is greater than between blacks (<20% of the
population) and whites. The gravest inequalities are not always racial, WEB
DuBois notwithstanding. As Vicente Navarro has pointed out, there is a
greater differential in the rate of death by heart disease between blue
collar and white collar workers than between blacks and whites. Navarro
then points out that the govt only get these stats by occupation in the
mid-1980s, while it continues to racialise the data. After all, the govt
can do something about racial inequality, while it cannot enter into the
hard-core of bourgeois relations.

At any rate, I never much agreed with the idea that "race" explains the
magnitude of the observed variance of income or the size of the labor
share. It's one thing to say that race disadvantages one in market
relations; another thing altogether to say that race explains how much bad
the market has to mete out, i.e. the magnitude of income inequality does
not increase because of race--whatever that could mean.  So if we are
trying to determine the changing magnitude of income inequality, it seems
to me superfluous to racialize the data from the pt of view of its
scientific explanation.

At any rate, Doug, I think that data on income inequality are pretty
irrelevant to the empirical confirmation of Marxian theory. It would be
more important to determine the rate of exploitation through a rejection of
wage share as its proxy or to determine whether real wage gains are only
coming at the expense of greater misery with the production process, that
abode into which bourgeois economists remain reluctant to enter.

Rakesh
Grad Student
UC Berkeley