What Wharton Students Reveal About The Economic Stories We Tell

Philip H

Philip H is an oceanographer who makes his way in the world trying to use more autonomy to sample and thus understand the world's ocean. He's a proud federal scientist, husband, father, woodworker and modelrailroader. The son of a historian and public-school teacher and the nephew and grandson of preachers, he believes one of his greatest marks on the world will be the words he leaves behind. To that end he writes here at OT and blogs very occasionally at District of Columbia Dispatches. Philip's views are definitely his own, and in no way reflect the official or unofficial position of any agency he works for now or has worked for in his career. If you disagree, take it up with him, not Congress.

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45 Responses

  1. InMD says:

    I think this is good in a way. Maybe next you’ll take on the bizarre stuff identity studies majors come away with from the ivy league.

    But a lot of this post is the usual misleading whiff on the ‘racial wealth gap’ when really what we have is better characterized as a class gap. The super rich 1% class is very, very white, and the ~20% below them whiter than average when scaled to national demographics, especially further towards the top. And that’s why this ‘household to household’ comparison ends up incredibly misleading. It isn’t that Joe white dude has 60% more than Bob black dude. It’s that the tiny Thurston Howell III class that controls an enormous share of the country’s wealth is made up of nearly all white people. You then get a scaled down version of it in the upper middle class, which while not nearly the level of the 1% still has a lot more wealth than the ~75-80% below.

    I will say I don’t get your point on the attendance rates. If Wharton is discriminating by race they can and should be investigated and sued into oblivion for it. My guess is that like most higher ed they’re actually bending over backwards to find ways to get more black and hispanic students but aren’t finding enough who are both coming out of high school college ready and even more important from the admissions office perspective, able to afford it.

    All of this is to say, misperceptions like this about income ought to be corrected. That’s part of a good education. But I’m not sure the ‘take’ here is shedding much light. Again, it’s not like we can’t find all kinds of strange, inaccurate beliefs across the population and wrap them up into our priors.Report

    • Philip H in reply to InMD says:

      I will say I don’t get your point on the attendance rates.

      But a lot of this post is the usual misleading whiff on the ‘racial wealth gap’ when really what we have is better characterized as a class gap.

      Race, wealth, and class are inextricably linked in the US. Discussing failed understandings of wealth, earnings, and Socioeconomic status that ignore race are not likely to do much to get at the root of the problem.

      https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/minorities#:~:text=The%20relationship%20between%20SES%2C%20race,SES%2C%20race%2C%20and%20ethnicity.Report

      • InMD in reply to Philip H says:

        I’m not sure what ‘failed understandings’ you’re talking about. That article makes the assertion you’re repeating without actually showing any work, including from the sources its citing. To me that’s a hallmark of most likely misleading journalism.

        I don’t want to get into a battle of the links here but if you’ve got something more credible that shows its work I’d certainly look at it.Report

      • Philip H in reply to Philip H says:

        Somehow that comment got botched. Clearly I didn’t have enough coffee in me when I wrote it.

        The APA article I linked here pulls together a lot of peer reviewed research into socio-economic status and race. And it reinforces the notion that the Wharton kids – as one example – have misleading understandings of the link between race and class as much as anything else. Perpetuating those misleading understandings drives failed attempts to resolve socioeconomic inequality, which includes intergenerational wealth, educational opportunity and attainment, and the ability of a person to rise up the economic ladder.
        Clearer?Report

        • InMD in reply to Philip H says:

          Definitely clearer and I find more to agree with there. But I also think it gets to some of my disagreements on point of emphasis here. Like, finding a way to double or triple the number black and hispanic millionaires or billionaires with elite educations, as applicable to the share of the population, probably isn’t going to do much to address the larger questions of economic/social mobility that are so tricky. Similarly to the extent this is perceived as an argument for redistribution from truly average white person to truly average black person… well no need to rehash that one but I assume you get where I’m going.Report

          • Oscar Gordon in reply to InMD says:

            Few weeks back (months back?) there was an article about a Bay Area couple who are black, who got a home appraisal that significantly low-balled the value of their home. They were smart enough to think the value didn’t pass the smell test and got a second appraisal, but had one of their white friends request it and stage the house as their own. Second appraisal was significantly higher. (multiple six figures higher).

            Obviously, they are suing (as they should), but this is an example of how generational wealth is curbed. We can think it’s a one off, but then, how many black homeowners would seriously question an appraisal that was low, as long as it wasn’t dramatically so? How many times does this happen that we don’t hear about? Do we have data that can be used to glean such information? What about interest rates, or loan approval amounts, or credit ratings?Report

            • InMD in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              There was a subthread on the housing issue that appears to have been deleted. It involved one of our new commenters. I assume there was a mod decision that it did not meet OT standards, and far be it from me to second guess.

              I don’t want to recreate the exchange, but suffice to say I think it’s a different argument than the ‘wealth gap.’ To the extent it’s related I find it to be a weird thing to pull out of the larger inequalities in how wealth is distributed in our society. Others of course disagree. I am going to leave it at that.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to InMD says:

                It ties to generational wealth, or even more directly, the ability to accumulate wealth.

                More directly, I think the criminal justice system does more to damage the ability of the bottom quintile(s) to manage wealth than any private entity bias.Report

            • Cleveland in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              You have law cases on LIARs. As in specific, “paid tons of money because they were in the wrong” lawsuits brought by North Carolina, among other States.

              I find this a little less “systemic racism” and a little more “2006 was stupid, and we corrected for it.”

              Systemic racism has more of a case when AGs aren’t salivating over throwing the book at realtors.Report

            • Brandon Berg in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              I saw that article. The appraisal wasn’t a one-off, but it also probably didn’t have anything to do with race. Home appraisal is not an exact science, and sometimes there are weird outliers. This article gives an example of the same thing happening to a white man.

              It’s very likely that if the black couple had just had another appraisal done, they would have got the same result, even without the subterfuge. In fact, the article mentioned that they knew their second appraisal was too low because they had had the home appraised once before at a much higher value, without pretending to be white.

              It doesn’t even make sense for home appraisers to value homes based on the race of the current owners. To the extent race matters, it’s the race of the neighbors, not the race of the current owner that people care about. Racism may play a role there, but there are also legitimate concerns about things like crime and local school test scores, which are generally higher and lower, respectively, in predominantly black neighborhoods.

              Outcomes with random variation are a gold mine for promoters of racial grievance narratives. All you have to do is a cherry pick an outlier where an Asian got a really bad outcome and compare it to a normal outcome for Bsians or even better a cherry-picked outlier where a Bsian got a really good outcome. This works even if there’s no difference in the average outcome experienced by Asians and Bsians. In fact, it works even if Asians get better outcomes on average.

              Sam has used this technique in some of his posts about police shootings, where he’ll point to a black person who was shot by police and a dangerous white suspect who was taken into custody safely and smugly insinuate that this is oh-so-telling.

              The reality is that the rate of fatal police shootings per million arrests is about the same for all races. Police safely arrest dangerous black suspects all the time, and they fatally shoot twice as many non-Hispanic white people as black people in any given year.Report

              • Brandon Berg in reply to Brandon Berg says:

                Regarding studies, here’s one from Freddie Mac last year.

                It shows that homes purchased by black buyers (they didn’t have data on race of sellers) were very slightly more likely to be appraised under the sale contract price, but for all races the vast majority of appraisals were greater than or above contract price. There was a larger, but still fairly small, gap for black and Latino neighborhoods, as opposed to individual buyers.

                Unfortunately, they only gave results in terms of percentage of appraisals that came in under the contract price. They don’t give any data on average or median appraisal as a percentage of sale price, so we don’t actually know if this is a matter of lower mean/median or higher variance. For example, if for both races the mean appraisal were 105% of contract price but the variance were higher for black neighborhoods, then you’d see a larger percentage of houses in black neighborhoods being overvalued and undervalued.

                They did some analysis to look for potential explanations, but don’t find any clear answer.

                Because most journalists are trash, there were a bunch of stories in the media about how a Freddie Mac study found huge racial gaps in home appraisals, but that’s bull.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Brandon Berg says:

                Excellent, thank you for the data!Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Brandon Berg says:

                I do agree that there is probably too much subjective versus objective in home appraisals, which is how such stories happen. There’s no way to remove the subjective, so the best we could do is insist the appraiser justify their numbers.Report

  2. Jaybird says:

    I’d like to see what Oberlin kids think it is.

    I think that pointing at Wharton is to misunderstand exactly where the problem lies.Report

  3. DensityDuck says:

    what the writer wants us to take away: “lol these rich kids r SOOOO DUM”
    what I take away: the reason liberals insist that the proper solution to everything is tax credits is that they honestly do believe everyone in America makes $75,000 a year and has plenty of income that they can redirect to different needs whenever they like, and that tax-code incentives are the best way to provide benefits
    “oh but Wharton is like SUPER conservative” yeah no the last time anyone checked only thirty percent of students there actually answered “likely to vote Republican”, they’re only SUPER conservative in comparison to most other colleges where the percent is more like zero. It’s not exactly a hotbed of JanSixers.Report

    • Philip H in reply to DensityDuck says:

      I made no political statement about Wharton students. I didn’t look at their politics. Their demographics suggest a good portion would at least be economic conservatives, wholeheartedly supporting lassiez faire capitalism.

      And liberals generally support tax credits because we actually know what the median income is in the US, we read wealth statistics, and we see few other ways besides pitchforks to improve the economic conditions of the vast majority of Americans.Report

  4. Damon says:

    “you then become a person who advocates for, institutionalizes and champions economic polices, corporate decisions, and educational opportunities that contribute to the vast wealth inequality in the country.”

    “You perpetuate a system that takes people like you and makes them richer and wealthier at the expense of a greater and greater swath of the nation.”

    Of course. You advocate and support a system that has been to your advantage. That makes personal economic success. This is surprising? You see a lot of poor people bitching about how the system keeps them down in the news? No, you see rich folks doing it….they already got theirs first. That’s the point.Report

    • Philip H in reply to Damon says:

      No I don’t think its particularly surprising. I do think is unethical at best to advocate for such a system, and then turn around and blame the people below you on the economic ladder for not climbing higher while you repeatedly kick them down.

      And I think the rich folks need to be reminded periodically that history tells us that eventually the peasants come for them with pitchforks and torches.Report

  5. Marchmaine says:

    I confess that I saw this on twitter as nothing more than twitter bait … anecdotal ‘evidence’ from a teacher? A literal sophomoric outlier? An opportunity to make a statement of preference that has no particular bearing on the anecdote? A good day for the teacher’s tweet stats.

    Raising awareness, but for what? You say race, she says class and links to two articles that are class based psychological studies:

    How Much (More) Should CEOs Make? A Universal Desire for More Equal Pay
    Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time

    I appreciate that you’re coming from a “Race, wealth, and class are inextricably linked in the US. Discussing failed understandings of wealth, earnings, and Socioeconomic status that ignore race are not likely to do much to get at the root of the problem” position… but this anecdote just doesn’t do the heavy lifting we need it to to get to this level of assertion/disagreement. (Plus, I don’t think you want to use ‘inextricably’ when we’re trying to argue/discuss ‘extricable’ policies – but that’s just a rhetorical heat-of-the-moment thing).Report

  6. Saul Degraw says:

    Business school especially elite business school is basically two years of networking. Wharton is relatively at the low-end of the elite business school spectrum. Some of the other elite ones are known for having sections reserved for the scions of families worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, combined with the political elitists of less than democratic countries. Wharton might have this too. The school’s admit just enough people from disadvantaged zipcodes to maintain a fig-leaf of meritocracy.Report

  7. LeeEsq says:

    To be fair, I think a lot of Americans would get this question wrong regardless of whether they vastly overestimate or vastly underestimate the average American income. Most people really can’t tell the difference between average and median and in the United States we have this really ridiculous definition of middle class that is way too broad. So when you combine American’s weird class terminology and looseness along with the normal amount of lack of knowledge, you are going to get some out there answers.Report

  8. Kazzy says:

    Just out of curiosity: 1/4 thought it was over six figures…. what’d the other 3/4 think?Report

  9. Jennifer Worrel says:

    I saw this on my Twitter feed and thought it interesting as well. I do think though, that regardless of the source of the survey (Wharton!), its still a survey of 22-24 year olds. Likely people who are not really responsible for all their own bills. People have proximity bias. Early twenty-somethings at an Ivy League business school are going to look around and assume that they are average (because their peer group looks like X) and answer as such. Yes, this is an age group in an environment that is far removed from much of America. Their answers are not shocking. (Except the $800,000 person)Report

    • I suppose that that’s a good point too.

      Every presidential election, the question of “does candidate so-and-so know how much a dozen eggs cost?” and I went shopping the day before and bought a dozen eggs and *I* have no idea how much a dozen eggs cost.Report

      • Dopefish in reply to Jaybird says:

        Yeah, that says something about how food deprived you are.
        Trust me, when you walk the whole way across Washington DC to buy soda, in order to skip the sales tax (buying from Virginia), you remember how much soda costs.

        … and you index your payments for Dole’s website to the cost of soda and videogames.Report

  10. Brandon Berg says:

    If you keep posting, Sam’s going to have to relinquish his title.Report