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Will note, people have mentioned that net worth is not income. The median income of blacks in Boston is actually pretty high compared to median incomes of blacks across the country. They also have lower poverty rates in Boston than both Hispanics and Asians.
The reason they have a lower net worth is because they are not using their income to build wealth via assets, along with the fact that there is no legacy of wealth that is prevalent amongst any segment of black America by which we were handed down from our ancestors because of the whole institutional racism thing that didn't really end until around 1980.
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Anyone who rents an apartment rather than owning a house or condo generally has little to no net worth. I have a negative net worth myself even though I make $52k/year, as I rent
Researchers conducted phone interviews about the financial status of households in Boston, The survey asked respondents about their assets, liabilities, financial resources, personal savings, and investment activities.
most people WONT ANSWER those type of PERSONAL questions
boston city population 673k
boston metro population 1.9 mil
city 34% owner occupied housing
metro 60% owner occupied housing
median home value 423k
median household income boston city...$59k
percent of Boston population that is black 19%
Minority owned companies 37K
blacks have much more "value" or "worth" than the $8 the BS your peddling
For starters it's MEDIAN worth so if they polled a bank CEO and two penniless grad students the Median net worth would be....$0. The average would probably be in the millions.
The only thing in your post that could point to a flaw in the study is possible polling bias that you noted above. I've not dug into the study to see if they had some mitigation for that.
I'm not terribly surprised by the results, city residents are often polarized between haves\nots and when noting the MEDIAN and as Bettafish noted lots of younger people with big student loans it sorta makes sense to me.
Considering the size of Boston, nowhere in the hundreds...
Next time you see an opinion poll or whatnot in the paper look at the fine print and you'll typically see 1000 or so people surveyed and an error margin of 3-5%.
For something like general income distribution 400-500 is probably sufficient.
The key is that the number of observations needed is related to the rarity of what you're trying to measure.
In simple terms let's say you're trying to figure out what % of free throws I can make, half court and full court shots.
100 observations would get you pretty close to my FT% with a modest error.
However, you'll need more to determine my half-court completion % with the same amount of error....and even more to determine my full court %.
Or as a final example, what if the poll was what % of blacks in Boston are millionaires? Since you're measuring just the far end of the distribution you'd need A LOT more samples to get a somewhat accurate estimate than if you're just trying to nail down an approximate median net worth.
and you can be sure that of the 400ish people, many if not most did NOT give accurate information
think about these numbers
boston city population 673k
within the city 34% of all housing is owner occupied
the median home value 423k
median household income boston city...$59k
percent of Boston population that is black 19% or 127k
there are 37,000 Minority owned companies
so in boston city 120,000 blacks, of which 34% OWN homes, of which the median value of those BLACK OWNED homes is 423k, and of those 120,000 black population, 37,000 own businesses
the numbers say the net worth of the black population is certainly not $8, for which the OP posted a garbage poll from a slanted site
Boston is 23% black, the 19% is erroneous, Boston hasnt been less than 20% black since the 1970s.... there are 155k blacks here. The Urban core is 12-13% black and the metro a a whole is 7-8% black.
Boston is 23% black, the 19% is erroneous, Boston hasnt been less than 20% black since the 1970s.... there are 155k blacks here. The Urban core is 12-13% black and the metro a a whole is 7-8% black.
The data is misleading. Dorchester is farther from downtown than Cambridge is, but the latter is not considered "Boston" proper. To the north of Charles River, ratio of black population is generally much lower than in the south, but only the south is "Boston".
Using averages in a scenario like this does not give you a very good picture.
No
It's a median
Quote:
Originally Posted by claymoore
That means half are worth LESS than $8.
Quote:
The $8 detail in the Globe’s Spotlight series on race in Boston is not a typo.
The median net worth for non-immigrant African-American households in the Greater Boston region is $8, according to “The Color of Wealth in Boston,” a 2015 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Duke University, and the New School.
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