In my continuing reading of Thomas Sowell's The Housing Boom and Bust, I find his statistics about racial disparity in mortgage approval a little...familiar.

It reminds me of the time that Sowell noted a formerly-oppressed minority which now has the highest median income of any ethnic group in the United States. And when he noted another minority who typically outscore the generic "White" on college-entrance exams.

This time around, he noted that when government agencies compiled data on mortgage acceptance/denial by racial groups, one distinct minority was more likely to be approved than generic "Whites", and less likely to purchase a home with sub-prime loans than the generic "White".

The minority in question
...is often called Asian-American. (I feel old-fashioned when I use the word "Oriental", and pedantic when I use the phrase "East Asian"...but I don't like hyphenated "-American" names, unless I can call myself an Anglo-American.)

As Sowell says many times, the evidence often used to bring charges of racism against Blacks by Whites can be equally used to claim racism against Whites, in favor of Asian-Americans, by...Whites.

(Again, I feel that "White" is too indistinct to represent cultural and ethnic traditions which vary from Ireland to Greece to Arminia to Spain...with millenia of racial prejudice and persecution between various groups. That history is almost equal to the few centuries of Whites purchasing Blacks from Blacks in Africa, and then importing said Blacks as slaves in North and South America.)

The upshot of the argument is that hidden racial bias may not explain all (or even most) of the statistical disparity noted. We need to look for other explanations.

In the cases Sowell mention, people of Asian descent who live in the United States are generally better students, better workers, and better managers of personal finance than any other ethnic minority. Thus the disparity between Asian-Americans and the generic White American.

Even Blacks and Whites of the same income level typically have large disparities of accumulated wealth and net worth. Thus, it is no surprise to see a differential in mortgage-approval rates for Black- and White-skinned applicants.

The list of misunderstandings propagated from these simple facts (and from ignoring facts about minorities like Asian-Americans) is disturbingly long. The fact that newspapers and publicists would deliberately accentuate the negative side of these facts without mentioning mitigating circumstances like credit scores, net worth, etc., turns the situation from disturbing to frightening.

Some of the many things that contributed to the housing boom and bust are based on these misunderstandings. Which makes the problem of housing in America disturbing, frightening, and depressing.

Posted by: karrde at 22:04 | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 433 words, total size 3 kb.