income

The Growth of Black Families Income

Jeremy Horpedahl4 Comments

Black families are the poorest major racial or ethnic group in the US. With a median income of $59,541, a Black family only has about 59 percent of the income of a White, Non-Hispanic family. That’s the same proportion, 59 percent, as was true in 1972, the earliest date that we have comparable data. (For most of the data in this post, I will be using Table F-23 from the Census Bureau’s Historical Income Tables.) That’s almost 50 years with no closing of the racial gap in total money income for families.

Of course, what this also means is that family incomes of both Black and Whites grew at the same rate from 1972 to 2021. They both are about 50 percent larger than in 1972, and that’s after accounting for inflation (using the CPI-U-RS). As a first point of optimism, this very much goes against the typical narrative of income stagnation since the early 1970s.

To be sure, some of this growth is because families have more earners today, but even so: they have a lot more income. Having two earners does mean that you must spend more on some consumption categories, such as daycare when kids are young, possibly more on dining out or prepared meals. But even with those additional expenses, these families will have significantly more disposable income than their 1970s counterparts.

There is an ever more optimistic fact that we need to point out for Black families today: there are many, many more rich Black families today than in 1972. There are more rich families in absolute terms and as a proportion of the total. Here is the basic data from the Census Bureau (it goes back to 1967, the earliest date available for Blacks).

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House Rich – House Poor

Zachary Bartsch3 Comments

Last week I presented a graphic that illustrates the changing average price of homes by state. This week, I want to illustrate something that is more relevant to affordability. FRED provides data on both median salary and average home prices by state. That means that we can create an affordability index. Consider the equation for nominal growth where i is the percent change in median salary (s), π is the percent change in home price (p), and r is the real percent change in the amount of the average home that the median salary can purchase (h).

(1+i)=(1+π)(1+r)

Indexing the home price and salary to 1 and substituting each the percent change equation (New/Old – 1) into each percent change variable allows us to solve for the current quantity of average housing that can be afforded with the median salary relative to the base period:

h=s/p-1

If h>0, then more of the average house can be purchased by the median salary – let’s vaguely call this housing affordability. Both series are available annually since 1984 through 2021 for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The map below illustrates affordability across states. Blue reflects less affordable housing and green reflects more affordable housing since 1984.

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The Unimportance of Inflation: Stocks & Flows

Zachary Bartsch5 Comments

One of my specializations in graduate school at George Mason University was monetary theory. It included two classes taught by Larry White who specializes in free-banking, Austrian macroeconomics, and monetary regimes. Separately, my dad was a libertarian and I’ve attended multiple Students for Liberty events. Right now, I’m writing from my hotel room at a Catholic/Crypto conference, where I learned that the deepest trench in Dante’s Inferno includes money debasers.

Everything about my pedigree suggests that I should have a disdain for the Federal Reserve and cast a wistful gaze toward the perpetually falling value of the US dollar. But I don’t. I certainly do have opinions about what the Fed should be doing and how our monetary system could work. But I’m not excited by the long-run depreciation of the dollar.

Let me tell you why.

Learning a little bit of theory is a dangerous thing. Monetary theory is especially hard because we examine the non-good side of the transaction: the medium of exchange. In frantic excitement, enthusiasts often point out that the value of the dollar has lost very much of its value in the past 100 years. They describe that loss by describing the lower quantity of something that a dollar can purchase now versus what it could have purchased historically. That information is incapsulated in the price of a good. The price of a good is the number of dollars that one must exchange in order to purchase the good. Similarly, the price of a dollar is the number of goods that one must give up in order to purchase the dollar.

We can consider a variety of goods. Below is a graph that describes the quantity price of the dollar where the quantities are CPI basket units, gold, and housing. In the 35 years following 1986, a single dollar purchases 60% less of the consumer basket, 74% fewer houses (not quality adjusted), and 76% less gold.

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The Cost of Raising a Child

Jeremy Horpedahl6 Comments

Raising kids is expensive. As an economist, we’re used to thinking about cost very broadly, including the opportunity cost of your time. Indeed, a post I wrote a few weeks ago focused on the fact that parents are spending more time with their kids than in decades past. But I want to focus on one aspect of the cost, which is what most “normal” people mean by “cost”: the financial cost.

Conveniently, the USDA has periodically put out reports that estimate the cost of raising a child. Their headline measure is for a middle-income, married couple with two children. Unfortunately the last report was issued in 2017, for a child born in 2015. And in the past 2 years, we know that the inflation picture has changed dramatically, so those old estimates may not necessarily reflect reality anymore. In fact, researchers at the Brookings Institution recently tried to update that 2015 data with the higher inflation we’ve experienced since 2020. In short, they assumed that from 2021 forward inflation will average 4% per year for the next decade (USDA assumed just over 2%).

Doing so, of course, will raise the nominal cost of raising a child. And that’s what their report shows: in nominal terms, the cost of raising a child born in 2015 will now be $310,605 through age 17, rather than $284,594 as the original report estimated. The original report also has a lower figure: $233,610. That’s the cost of raising that child in 2015 inflation-adjusted dollars.

As I’ve written several times before on this blog, adjusting for inflation can be tricky. In fact, sometimes we don’t actually need to do it! To see if it is more or less expensive to raise a child than in the past, what we can do instead is compare to the cost to some measure of income. I will look at several measures of income and wages in this post, but let me start with the one I think is the best: median family income for a family with two earners. Why do I think this is best? Because the USDA and Brookings cost estimates are for married couples who are also paying for childcare. To me, this suggests a two-earner family is ideal (you may disagree, but please read on).

Here’s the data. Income figures come from Census. Child costs are from USDA reports in 1960-2015, and the Brookings update in 2020.

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