The Agenda

In my quest to find new reading material, I've wandered into the land of think tanks, and earlier today was looking at the Brookings Institution website. I found an interesting post there: What should the Biden administration prioritize in a policy agenda that promotes equity for Black Americans? It's a set of policy recommendations from a panel of Brookings experts. They're fairly straightforward; I'm not sure that one needs experts to make these cases. Only "Require all banks to offer very low-cost basic accounts" and "Reduce the barriers to entering the legal profession," were things that I hadn't heard suggested before. And there was one thing that struck me as a glaring omission; the list didn't include anything about financial literacy. (Which is something that I think is just a good thing in general.)

The general gist of the entire set of recommendations, though was the usual. Make Black Americans better able to compete in society. Whether that was for jobs, wealth building opportunities or what have you. Which is fine. But what about the people that they're now going to be outcompeting? I'm not sure that the problem is as much the same people are always losing the race as it is that the loser starves.

Of course, if equity is the problem, that might not really be a big consideration, but I think that it's worth putting more thought into. Because while "Address exclusionary zoning laws and encourage pathways to build wealth outside homeownership" made the list, there wasn't much about helping Black people make the most of the resources they have to create, and protect, wealth. Sure, there are parts of the country where people are threatened when people they dislike do better for themselves, and so one can imagine some level of resistance to anything that assists one group of people more than another. But if one's going to think big, then maybe going really big, and asking how to get to a post-scarcity economy, is the way to go.