Recently I was watching a lecture by historian Marcus Witcher which addressed the treatment of African Americans in the Jim Crow era. Witcher mentioned the “pig laws,” which were severe legal punishments given to Blacks in the South for what used to be petty crimes. Such as stealing a pig. He mentioned that the fines could be anywhere from $100 to $500, and then he asked me directly: how much is $100 adjusted for inflation today?
My initial, immediate answer was about $3,000. That turns out to be almost exactly correct for around 1880. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this wasn’t a satisfactory answer. We were trying to put $100 from a distant past year in context to understand how much of a burden this was for African Americans at the time. Does knowing that adjusted for inflation it’s about $3,000 give us much context?
On the Positivity Blog are no less than “67 Don’t Look Back Quotes to Help You Move on and Live Your Best Life”. Some of these sayings from notable folks include:
“Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.” – Henry David Thoreau
“If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.” – Steve Jobs
“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” – C.S. Lewis
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened”
– attributed to Dr. Seuss, though that attribution is heavily disputed
The Random Vibez offers another “60 Don’t Look Back Quotes To Inspire You To Move Forward”’ including “Don’t look back. You’ll miss what’s in front of you” and “I tend not to look back. It’s confusing”. The Bible would add sayings such as, “Let your eyes look straight ahead; fix your gaze directly before you” (Proverbs 4:25); Paul wrote to the Philippians, “One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me”.
The Landy-Bannister Statue
What put me in mind of this whole theme of not looking back was seeing a bronze statue involving Roger Bannister. Sports buffs, and most educated people who are over 60, will know that he was the first man to break the four-minute mile. During many previous decades of trying, no human had been able to run that fast that long: that is a velocity of 15 miles per hour, sustained for a full four minutes. That is like a full sprint for most people, or a moderate bicycling speed.
Bannister found that he was naturally a fast runner, and he employed scientific principles in his training. (He was a medical student at the time, and went on to become a noted research neurologist). On May 6, 1954 Bannister finally cracked the four-minute mile, with a 3:59.4 time. As may be imagined, the crowd went wild.
Records, however, are made to be broken, and just 46 days later a rival runner, John Landy, ran the mile in just 3:57.9 to become the world’s fastest man. A few months after that Bannister and Landy ran head-to-head in the August, 1954 Commonwealth games in Vancouver. Landy was in the lead nearly the whole way, with a ten-yard lead by the end of the third lap. Bannister then started his signature kick and managed to catch up with Landy on the final bend. Landy must have heard footsteps, and at the end of the race glanced over his left shoulder to gauge Bannister’s position. That distraction slowed him just enough to allow Bannister to power past him on his right side. Landy’s time was still a respectable 3:59.6, but Bannister won with 3:58.8. Both runners later agreed that Landy would have won if he had not looked back.
This finish of this “Miracle Mile” race was immortalized by a larger-than-life bronze statue by Vancouver sculptor Jack Harman. Landy later quipped, “”While Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt for looking back, I am probably the only one ever turned into bronze for looking back.”
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. The 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).
Are there racial gaps in the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine? This is an important and interesting question in its own right. But I’ll talk about this question today because it’s an interesting example of how confusing and sometimes misleading data can be.
How do we answer this question? One is by surveying people. There are a number of surveys that ask this question, but a recent one by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that among adults 70% of Blacks and 71% of Whites report being vaccinated. And given the sampling error possible with surveys, we would say that these are virtually identical. No racial gap! (Note: there was a racial gap when they did the same survey back in April, with 66% of Whites and 59% of Blacks vaccinated.)
But, surveys are just a sample, and perhaps people are lying. Maybe we shouldn’t trust surveys! And shouldn’t there be hard data on vaccines? Indeed, the CDC does publish data on vaccinations by race. That data shows a fairly large gap: 42.3% of Whites and only 36.6% of Blacks vaccinated. This is for at least one dose, and the percentages are of the total population (which is why it’s lower than the survey data). So maybe there is a racial gap after all!
But wait, if you look closely at the footnotes (always read the footnotes!), you’ll see something curious: the CDC admits that the race data are only available for 65.8% of the data. We don’t have the race information for over one-third of those in this data. Yikes! And given the exist disparities we know about in terms of income and access to healthcare, we might suspect that the errors are not randomly distributed. In other words, if there is probably good reason to suspect that Blacks are disproportionately reflected in the “unknown” category. But we just don’t know.
So what can we do? Since this data comes from US states, we can look at the individual state data and see if perhaps some of it is better (fewer unknowns). What does that data show us?
Economist Writing Every Day 
