Racial inequities cost US economy trillions
Large and persistent gaps in rates of employment, education, and earnings across races add up to a smaller economic pie for the nation as a whole.
Racial and ethnic inequities have cost the US economy some US$51 trillion in lost output since 1990, San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly said Wednesday, citing data from a paper she and three co-authors will present at The Brookings Institution.
Large and persistent gaps in rates of employment, education, and earnings across races "add up to a smaller economic pie for the nation as a whole," Daly said in a briefing ahead of the paper's release Thursday.
"The imperative for equity, for closing some of these gaps, is not only a moral one, but it's also an economic one."
The paper maps out what Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would have been if gaps in the labour market didn't exist. Employment for Black men, for instance, is consistently lower than that for men of other races.
Daly and her co-authors calculated what the gains to GDP would be if those and other race-based gaps were erased: if Black and Hispanic men and women held jobs at the same rates as whites, if they completed college at the same rates as whites, and if they earned the same as whites.
From labour alone, they figured, the gains would add up to US$22.9 trillion over the thirty years from 1990 to 2019, with bigger gains in more recent years as the share of non-white populations has increased while the gaps have remained fairly steady.- Nampa/Reuters
Large and persistent gaps in rates of employment, education, and earnings across races "add up to a smaller economic pie for the nation as a whole," Daly said in a briefing ahead of the paper's release Thursday.
"The imperative for equity, for closing some of these gaps, is not only a moral one, but it's also an economic one."
The paper maps out what Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would have been if gaps in the labour market didn't exist. Employment for Black men, for instance, is consistently lower than that for men of other races.
Daly and her co-authors calculated what the gains to GDP would be if those and other race-based gaps were erased: if Black and Hispanic men and women held jobs at the same rates as whites, if they completed college at the same rates as whites, and if they earned the same as whites.
From labour alone, they figured, the gains would add up to US$22.9 trillion over the thirty years from 1990 to 2019, with bigger gains in more recent years as the share of non-white populations has increased while the gaps have remained fairly steady.- Nampa/Reuters
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