Race & Wealth Spotlight Ep 2: Mehrsa Baradaran and Bridging the Racial Wealth Divide
In the second Spotlight on Race and Wealth episode Dedrick speaks with Mehrsa Baradaran, Professor of law at UCI Law about race and wealth inequality. Mehrsa discusses Postal Banking and The Homestead Act, policies that can lead to bridging the racial wealth divide.
Listen on soundcloud at: https://soundcloud.com/raceandwealthnetwork/spotlight-ep-2-mehrsa-baradaran-and-bridging-the-racial-wealth-divide
Listen on itunes at: https://podcasts.apple.com/dz/podcast/race-wealth-spotlight-ep-2-mehrsa-baradaran-bridging/id1075313059?i=1000455302056
Episode Highlights:
Mehrsa: When you have a natural system where a few people are going to hold a lot of capital or one raise doesn’t have capital was not allowed to own homes and their property was not protected. Can you disrupt that? What you see in history is that the only way you build wealth in new communities is a capital shift.
Mehrsa: This is where wealth vs income comes in to play. Wealth inequality is much stickier and much less dependent on individual decisions. Yes, a person could increase their income within a certain range, even that is pretty sticky. It is very difficult to go from a very low wealth family or environment into a high wealth one and vice versa. The passed down nature of wealth really creates these intergenerational disparities.
Mehrsa: This is why this idea of individual decision is this false promise of equality. I don’t think any class has a monopoly on good decision making.
Dedrick: The problem is if you look at Black or Latino wealth, it is mostly in-home ownership while white wealth is more in stocks and these types of things. The issue is that blacks need to be more in stock but it’s not looking at the reality of if you have a median wealth of 3 or 4 thousand dollars you are not running around trying to figure out what stocks to invest in. You’re lucky to be a homeowner and you’re trying to pay off that mortgage.
Mehrsa: 60% of Americans have their main asset in a home. It’s cross racial, but with black and brown homes they don’t increase in value as much as do white homes because of embedded natures of segregation and racism. The market is racist because it embeds people’s preferences. People would rather move in to an all-white community than a black one and those market rates reflect that.
Mehrsa: Poor people pay 10% of their income just to use their money because banks are no longer serving these clients. And then you have payday lending and high interest rate other forms of lending: pawn, title. So how do you fix this? A lot of people respond with community banks, small banks, credit unions. My research and history show that these banks either are not or are not doing it. Credit unions are not offering accounts to the unbanked. They’re just as big, their clients are more wealthy than bank clients even.
Mehrsa: One of the most effective, in American history, of financial inclusion was through the postal bank. It is not a radical idea, but it has been approached as one. The idea is the Post Office already exists everywhere. It already has that transmission mechanism of it already gives money orders, already has its own network. You could transfer money; you could deposit money in a little saving account there. You could link up and get a digital account. You could even get loans at the Post Office.
Dedrick: There is much more mainstream conversations about big policy ideas that could help address some of these issues. Even though postal banking wouldn’t bridge the racial wealth divide. It would disproportionately help the under banked which are African Americans, Latinos and large numbers of Whites as well.
Mehrsa: This is where the Homestead Act comes in. Over the last 30 years, and I have spoken a lot against this, we have these tax incentive programs like opportunity zones or enterprise zones. The idea is we are going to give businesses goodies like tax cuts and the business investment in this community is going to benefit everybody. And that just doesn’t work, one, because of the capital idea. The person getting the capital is that business. The person getting the tax cut is the outside business.