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"Where, exactly, does the money to pay for their additional salary and jobs come from?"

From the first paragraph of the Introduction to the article:

"Racial inequality costs the U.S. economy an estimated $16 trillion in lost gross domestic product (GDP), failing to hire job seekers with a criminal history results in an annual loss of $78 billion in U.S. GDP, and the persistent gender pay gap restrains the global economy by about $160 trillion"




Those are extremely bold claims — the assertion that disagreement is a misperception even more so.

Is it a misperception of reality that I believe their proposals would decrease overall economic efficiency, not increase it?

The situations they presented are zero-sum. To believe otherwise, you’d have to share their (unsupported, unstated-to-participants) premise that resulting efficiency gains would offset the additional cost that came out of your own pocket to enforce equality of outcome.


Global GDP is about 80 trillion. Those numbers are laughable.


US GDP is about a quarter of that, about 24T. So an estimated reduction in efficiency of 40% (40T -> 24T). Seems high, but maybe not laughably so, to me

https://www.bea.gov/news/2022/gross-domestic-product-first-q...


digging down to the cited source on US GDP point, honestly seems pretty reasonable

> We discover that closing racial gaps is a pareto improvement to both the U.S. economy and society. If racial gaps for Blacks had been closed 20 years ago, U.S. GDP could have benefitted by an estimated $16 trillion. If we close gaps today, the equivalent add to the U.S. economy over the next five years could be $5 trillion of additional GDP, or an average add of 0.35 percentage points to U.S. GDP growth per year and 0.09 percentage points to global GDP growth per year.

https://ir.citi.com/NvIUklHPilz14Hwd3oxqZBLMn1_XPqo5FrxsZD0x...


> If racial gaps for Blacks had been closed 20 years ago

A gap is an interval, meaning a spread of outcomes is inevitable in narrowing.

This statement assumes the gap to be closed by raising Black wealth to that of Whites. That's sloppy.

What if the gap is closed by bringing both populations to the median? What if the gap is closed by bringing both populations down to the Black standard?

All three of these are equality of outcome. If there's an argument why the best of these outcomes should be presumed, it hasn't been made.


Failing to hire cats costs the economy another $2.5 quadrillion, and failing to employ birds - $450 quadrillion. The good thing is nobody can disprove these claims.


People with criminal histories have imposed a trillion dollar cost on society.


Lots of people make money when someone goes to prison. All that money taxpayers spend to operate the prison system goes somewhere.




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