Responses to Questions about a Path to Economic Equality

BlackEconomics.org®

On April 5, 2024, BlackEconomics.org released a commentary entitled “Questions about a Path to Economic Equality,” which featured nine interrogatives. The promised responses are provided below.

1. There appears to be no major violation of logic or pragmatism to accept equivalent Black and Non-Black American economic statistics as a reasonable metric for defining economic equality. But we should never stop asking: “Why just equal? Have we been anchored?”
2. The US pseudo capitalist/market economy reflects conceptual and theoretical principles that automatically reward winners of competitions and the most meritorious efforts. In this “dog-eat-dog” world, there is a continuous clamor for position and power. And NO economic agent is expected to voluntarily concede economic position and/or power.
3. “Talk is cheap: It takes money to buy land.” “Talk” alone is usually insufficient to achieve anything (other than maybe for those operating in Information and Public Administration industries) of substantial economic value in the US economy. Therefore, Black Americans should prepare ourselves mentally, spiritually, and physically to project much more than vocal power in our pursuit of economic equality.
4. Black – Non-Black economic convergence is unlikely to ever occur in the US for three main reasons:(1) (i) Non-Blacks who control financial and physical means of production are not likely to permit Blacks to gain sufficient control of these means of production except, potentially, far into the future; (ii) Non-Blacks’ economic positions continue advancing, and Blacks’ economic advancement—even if at a higher rate—will not permit convergence except, potentially, far into the future; and (iii) the supply of selected physical means of production may decline over a potentially convergence period, which may reduce their affordability and Blacks’ access to them.
5. Agreed. (See footnotes 1 and 2.)
6. Agreed. Important go-to sources on Reparations to enable economic equality (Darity and Mullen (2020) and Darity, Mullen, and Hubbard (2024)) place the gift (Reparations) requirement in the $10-to-$14 trillion range.(2)
7. BlackEconomics.org views the optimal configuration of a Reparations gift to Black America as having the following characteristics:
   1. Should be organized and extended at a single point in time (a lumpsum).
   2. Should be extended with the purpose and intent that Black America will use it to achieve significant independence, self-sufficiency, self-determination, and liberty.
   3. Should be in the form of land; financial resources; an agreement to provide equipment, materiel, and services; and an agreement to assist Black Americans in positioning ourselves internationally with access to international markets, organizations, and institutions.
8. The gift should be configured as outlined in components ii and iii of Response 7; however, the gift could be extended intertemporally with appropriate adjustments to valuations to account for the time value of resources.
9. Currently, the probability is very low of receiving a gift as conceived herein in the short run. The probability may rise substantially in the intermediate to long run if: (i) Black America experiences a renewal and restoration of our African minds; (ii) Black America achieves substantial unity of agreement and effort; (iii) Most Black Americans come to realize the necessity of such a gift; (iv) Given i-iii, almost all Black Americans recognize that we are worthy and deserving of such a gift.

B Robinson
041224

1 See Brooks Robinson (2014), “From Inequality to Equality: Hypothesizing about the Possibilities,” BlackEconomics.org, https://www.blackeconomics.org/BEFuture/fie.pdf and Brooks Robinson (2015), “Will US Black and White Household Incomes Ever Converge?”
BlackEconomics.org, https://www.blackeconomics.org/BELit/wubwhec.pdf (Ret. 040824).
2 William Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen (2020). From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century. Chapel Hill. UNC Press.