One of the myriad of Washington Post house conservatives ran an OpEd last
week saying he was for reparations to African Americans. But, he basically
said they should take $50K per family and forever after shut up about
affirmative action. Here is my response, to be published in the Washington
Post tomorrow. The fact that the Post accepted this makes me worry that I
am being compromised. So here it is for Pen-L to critique. Could you have
done a better job and still been published?
By the way, it is now really easy to submit a letter to the Post by email
through their web page.
In his April 6 op-ed column, Charles
Krauthammer cavalierly suggests that the U.S. government make one-time
reparation payments of
$50,000 per family of four to African Americans. Even if one were to
accept the dubious assertion that all forms of active discrimination, or
the lingering effects of the legacy of discrimination, are in the past,
the price he puts on the historic economic injustice done to African
Americans is awfully cheap.
One measure of this injustice, itself only partial, is the difference
in household net wealth accumulated by middle age. Data from the U.S.
Health and Retirement Survey indicate this difference to be at least
$100,000 on average, double Charles Krauthammer's recommended payment.
This figure itself underestimates the true difference because it is
expressed in 1994 dollars and because it does not take into account both
the much higher percentage of African American families with negative net
wealth and the higher percentage of white families with very large
amounts of net wealth, which tends to be under-measured by standard
government statistics.
Most tragic, it does not take into account the economic value of the
deficit in human life expectancy experienced by African Americans, itself
heavily related to economic deprivation. In 1993, only 66 percent of
African American men reached age 60, compared with 84 precent of white
men.
Standard economic valuations used in legal and regulatory settings
place a monetary value of at least $100,000 on a year of life expectancy
(and often much more). So it appears that the just economic compensation
that Charles Krauthammer advocates comes with a much higher price tag
than he, at first glance, is willing to acknowledge.
