Is wealth-building zero-sum?

Is wealth-building zero-sum? July 30, 2017

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMoney_Cash.jpg; By Jericho [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

This isn’t so much a rhetorical question as a real issue for discussion.

Here’s an article I came across in my twitter feed earlier today:  “This is what reparations could actually look like in America.”  Not much is really new here:  the author, Chuck Collins, proposes that the funds for the reparations would come from the usual “millionaires and billionaires” and would cover such items as home purchase subsidies, free college tuition for first-generation students, “roots trips” to Africa, endowments for museums covering the history of slavery and its aftermath, and funds to expand African-American history in schools.

And the rationale for reparations is likewise not new.  Here’s how Collins expresses it:

Many whites with little in the bank to show for their racial advantage will understandably be frustrated by the concept of reparations. If they never owned slaves—and neither did their ancestors—why should they have to pay? By the same token, many first- or second-generation Americans, whose European ancestors fled their own hardships to come to the US, feel miles and centuries apart from slavery.

The key point, however, is the unpaid labor of millions—and the compounding legacy of slavery, Jim Crow laws, discrimination in mortgage lending, and a race-based system of mass incarceration—created uncompensated wealth for individuals and white society as a whole. Immigrants with European heritage directly and indirectly benefited from this system of white supremacy.

The bottom line to this line of argumentation always tends to boil down to this:  there’s a limited amount of wealth to go around.  Regardless of whether white people “feel” better off, the fact that blacks were denied the ability to build wealth means that by definition, whites benefited.  And that sounds intuitively correct.  After all, if their was a certain pool of funds for homeownership subsidies, for instance, and blacks were excluded from the pool, then that means more for the whites, right?  Likewise, denying black men and women the opportunity to study at universities left more places open for whites, and denying them jobs at good wages left those jobs open for whites.

But consider the rhetoric behind “diversity.”

We’re told that we should support “diversity” and “multiculturalism” because having a diverse society benefits everyone, because those with alternate perspectives increase innovation, allow businesses to be more successful, and so on.  We’re told that enabling underrepresented groups to study helps them “achieve their full potential” and enables them to make their fullest contribution to society, that everyone wins when discrimination is ended.

We’re told this (and by “we,” I admittedly mean “white people”) to get our buy-in onto anti-discrimination programs for practical reasons, not just because it’s the morally right thing to do.  But, of course, both these things can’t be true simultaneously:  white people can’t have been enriched all these years due to slavery and Jim Crow, and at the same time, anti-discrimination pro-diversity measures can’t be a boon to our society and economy because of all of the potential contributions of minority groups.

Or, rather, both of these things cannot be true in their exaggerated, simplistic form.

So that’s what I invite readers to chew on for the day.

 

Image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMoney_Cash.jpg; By Jericho [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons


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