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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

> In the US, race is very much tied to socioeconomic status and class.

Great! So looking at socioeconomic status will also address socioeconomic status caused by racial discrimination. Glad you understand and agree with the parent.

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How do you identify socioeconomic class?

Tax returns? Paystubs? Accounting for wealth generally?

Wealthy folks typically don't make a large wage, they receive a dividend on investments and large loans against collateral.

Note that this is critical to consider if we are to discriminate based on socioeconomic class.

Every social research paper must more or less identify and classify socioeconomic status in order to do proper science. What ever social concept a researcher is studying, the first thing people will ask is: "did you account for socioeconomic status?"

This PDF looks like a good start if you want to see how it get measured during research: https://obssr.od.nih.gov/sites/obssr/files/Measuring-Socioec...

Council tax bracket is how we do it in the UK. Is there an American equivalent? Some kind of proxy for land value?

These are the same exact metrics used to demonstrate that blacks are disadvantaged.

>How do you identify socioeconomic class?

How do you identify race? After all, it's just a social construct. We're not DNA testing and doing the one-drop rule are we? Its' self-reported. At least with socioeconomics we can look at household income and tax returns.

Got it. So we likely agree that wealth identification will be difficult here if we're only going with household income and tax returns.

It's definitely a thorny process whichever factor one adopts to benchmark process outcomes against.

No, it's far easier to determine socioeconomics. After all, if you're going to favor a specific race, how do you prove their race? What percentage of their bloodlines needs to be from that race? We really start getting into yellow badge territory eventually, and at best all it does is create racial animosity and resentment, which we see now: https://news.gallup.com/poll/318851/perceptions-white-black-...

Meanwhile, everybody pays taxes so we have the data we need to not use racial discrimination.

> Meanwhile, everybody pays taxes so we have the data we need to not use racial discrimination.

Actually, the very wealthy _don't_ pay a ton in taxes, depending on how their wealth is invested and distributed.

What wealthy folks often do is to take lending against their assets, giving them liquidity. This is not taxable income.

This little argument is a great summary of what's going on in our society: the rich are shifting the public attention from their wealth to skin color of the poor. "Weath is hard to quantify and we should stop talking about it, while skin color is very apparent and the Social Justice Book we've given to you clearly states that skin color is more important than money."

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