Even if you accept that differences are solely economic (this a very tough sell for raical inequality imo, it's far from fully explained by economics), that leaves you with the question of why are black people disproportionately impoverished. This is a tougher question than why women tend to work fewer hours.

Hmmm...I used "generally" and "high order bit".

Somehow this turned into "solely". Why?

And I am fully aware that these facts are a "tough sell" these days, because they don't fit the prevailing narrative.

Another one: yes, the criminal justice system is biased against blacks. However, it is vastly more biased against males. By a 6:1 margin.

And yes, I agree that the question why black people who are not recent immigrants are disproportionately impoverished is important to answer. It is important to ask the right questions if you want to get a usable answer. And I doubt there is a unifactorial answer.

Why the "who are not recent immigrants"? Black people who are recent immigrants from Africa actually do better economically than whites.

"Solely" is a thought experiment, just to highlight the importance of that question.

It's a tough sell because statistics don't back it up; there are other significant factors at play.

There are certainly some biases against men but i think you are overestimating this one. Are you accounting for the differences between men and women?

The success of African immigrants suggests that the effect really has nothing to do with skin color, but other societal and cultural factors. Luckily society and culture are both mutable.

1. When someone writes "generally" and you answer with "solely", it sure sounds a lot like you're setting up a straw-man.

2. The statistics do back it up.

3. "This gender gap is about six times as large as the racial disparity that Prof. Starr found in another recent paper."

https://web.archive.org/web/20180428124536/https://www.law.u...

4. Yes, skin color certainly does not appear to be a dominant factor, and maybe not a factor at all as you write.

A young black man in the 2nd perctile of income has the same chance of being incarcerated as a young white man in the 65th. The difference between the 1st percentile and 99th percentile young white men is smaller than between 80th percentile black men and white men. [1] I'm not sure which stats you are looking at, but the ones I see suggest that economics are not the biggest factor.

The gender disparity is interesting and I wasn't aware of it's severity. Thanks.

[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/03/19/race-class-deba...

So your blog post is contradicted by the research I cited.

How to explain the difference? Well, the blog post doesn't control for other variables. Such as, crucially, how much crime do people commit and how severe are those crimes?

The UofM study did control for such factors.

And yeah, how much crime people commit varies and, yeah, has a pretty severe impact on how much incarceration happens. If you didn't control for these variables, the male/female disparity would be incredibly more severe, as the vast majority of inmates are male.

And if you look, you will see that the research the blog post references comes from an advocacy group.