Wednesday, July 8, 2009

#22. Saving Money for the Future


One of the most important books ever written, The Richest Man in Babylon, is ostensibly not to be found on most Black people's bookshelf. USA Today has recently published a shocking story regarding the un-niggardly mores of Black people and their lowly savings rate.

Black people are not fond of saving money, when compared to their white counterparts:

"African Americans are more than twice as likely as whites or Asians to take a hardship withdrawal from their 401(k) plans. The withdrawal rate also was higher for Hispanics, although not as high as African Americans'. Asians had the lowest rate....African Americans and Hispanics also are much more likely to take money out of their 401(k) plans for emergencies, which could further stunt long-term savings growth. And they are less likely to invest in stocks in favor of low-risk investments and real estate, increasing the risk that their savings won't keep pace with inflation, retirement specialists say."
The article would go on to state:
"Since 401(k) plans are now the primary retirement savings tool and the savings disparities are so significant, it's apparent that minorities are likely to retire with less financial security, said Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments."Without a significant effort to improve savings and investing behaviors, African-American and Hispanic workers are in danger of retiring into poverty," she said in a statement."

Black people, based on this study of 401(k) plans, have the innate ability to save, although it would appear, according Alicia Munnell, that:

"African Americans and Hispanics also are less likely to inherit money than whites, Munnell says, which leaves less of a financial cushion against hard times. As a result, she says, these groups have a tougher time putting money in a retirement account and also tend to be more cautious about investing in the unpredictable stock market.

Minorities also may be held back by family obligations, says Monique Morrissey, economist at the Economic Policy Institute. If a worker comes from a demographic group that has been disadvantaged over generations, she says, the individual is more likely to be responsible for family members."

Taken into context, don't these quotes about inheriting money and the purported disadvantaged groups just further substantiate the idea of innate inability to save money among Black people, if they are unable to have any money to pass on to their progeny, it would lead any sane person to infer from the available data that generations of Black people have never saved money.

Black people haven't just started not saving money, as this USA Today article would want you to believe, but have always been against saving money, hence the reality of generations of Black people without money to inherit. No one saved any in the previous generation.

Dave Chappelle, the comic Black people don't like, has shown us in a hilarious skit what will happen when reparations are finally given to Black people, and the results fit in nicely with the reality of "delayed gratification" that Black people seem to not like either.

In the skit from his hit-TV show, Chappelle lampoons Black people who have recently received reparations:

"...Chappelle reparations skit, where blacks blow it all on trucks of menthol cigarettes, gold chains, FUBU, fried chicken, and so on was in essence what would happen. In something approaching amazement, he asked me if I was aware it was satire. Of course, but only in the aesthetic particulars; the wasteful splurging with no thought of tomorrow was obviously what would happen, just as with lottery winners."
The idea of "Delayed Gratification" is not just a nefarious stereotype of Black people, as the USA Today published study on Black peoples inability to save - conducted by Hewitt Associates - proves. Black people, as one prominent psychologist has written, display:

"The impulsiveness component of psychopathic personality includes an inability or unwillingness to delay immediate gratification in the expectation of long-term advantage. The first study to demonstrate differences between blacks and whites in the delay of gratification was carried out by W. Mischel in Trinidad in the late 1950s. He offered black and white children the choice between a small candy bar now or a larger one in a week. He found black children were much more likely to ask for the small candy bar now, and this difference has been confirmed in three subsequent American studies. This racial difference has been noted but given different names by different writers. In The Unheavenly City Revisited, Edward Banfield writes of the “extreme present-orientation” of blacks, and Michael Levin writes of “high time preference,” an economist’s term for preferring cash now rather than a greater sum in the future."
Black people live for the now, epitomized by the idea of "Get rich or die trying" which is the ethos for the Black community. Black people will continue to view saving money for the future as Stuff Black People Don't Like and will continue to blame others for the generational problems.

Chappelle's Show
Reparations 2003
www.comedycentral.com
Buy Chappelle's Show DVDsBlack ComedyTrue Hollywood Story



Chappelle's Show
Reparations 2003 Follow-Up
www.comedycentral.com
Buy Chappelle's Show DVDsBlack ComedyTrue Hollywood Story

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

They also dont like sharing. I think that somehow relates to this.

Anonymous said...

They dont like sharing either, i think that some how relates to this.

Anonymous said...

Blacks will beg to borrow money for things as frivolous as a soda or bag of chips.

Anonymous said...

In a discussion with a black African American woman, I once advocated that the leading and most urgent issue confronting Afro-Americans was the need to learn about and institute meansures to build family wealth, and inheritances for the next generation.

She just shot down the idea with no explanation whatsoever, and insisted that civil rights were the number one issue.

To be honest, I think the white European Americans also need to do the same thing. We've lost the underlying sense of the generations, and many of us live just for today.

Anonymous said...

I am so absurdly offended that there aren't even enough words in Webster to cover the ignorance on this page and included in this website. How dare you talk about groups of people as if we are scientific lab rats. There is definietly a measure of truth and an underlying message in what you've laid out here, but, how utterly insulting to relate your "findings" in such a racially insensitive ignorant way. We are the only human beings in America that has 0 heritage or who don't know our culture because it was erased from our minds and implanted with the thought that we were inferior from our devilish counterparts who seem to think that they more Godly for some dumbass reason. Don't be a part of the problem by spreading half truths and falsities. Explain that a black person will likely be born into an almost unescapable poverty which has them living in subpar neigborhoods, working in subpar dead-end jobs while physically overexerting themselves and being paid minimal wages. So YES, we do need to borrow sometimes, YES, we have to provide for our families today leaving small to none being saved or invested, and YES this applies to some blacks and not all. I've been able to exscape the rat race and survive in a very palely ran society.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, your ancestors were the inferior ones in Africa because your ancestors' tribe was the one that got captured by the stronger tribes and then sold off to whites involved in the slave trade

crazy person said...

Well actually, every human being in America, and Africa, and every inch of the planet are people with "0 heritage who don't know [their] culture" because homo sapiens were genetically engineered in a lab on the 12th planet 450,000 years ago and have all been owned by an extraterrestrial race who created you solely to work as slaves in mines for gold and work as forced labor to build monolithic sites for them to dock spaceships on while taking all of the gold for themselves and raping human females creating hybrid bloodlines that have controlled history since before Christ.

Duhhhhh guys. Ignorant jiggaboos.

Anonymous said...

I worked with a number of different black people for several years. I was always amazed at the things they spent their money on. They spent money like a drunken sailor.