Wealth among Asian Americans is so highly concentrated among those at the top of the socioeconomic ladder that wealth inequality among people of Asian descent is even greater than the already high wealth inequality among Whites.
Furthermore, focusing only on average or median wealth of Asian Americans is unfairly misleading because it ignores many of them who struggle economically.
“A large share of Asian-Americans have little or no wealth (which) is particularly disconcerting,” the report’s authors state. “If the past few decades are any indication, the economic future remains uncertain and people need more savings.”
Unlike income, which consists of job earnings, wealth is what’s left after subtracting debt from a person’s bank accounts, retirement assets and housing.
Asian American wealth on average and at the median tends to be comparable to that of Whites — at least in the years since the Great Recession ended in 2009. However, jumping to the conclusion that Asians are uniformly as wealthy as Whites overlooks the fact that the economic experiences of Asians are more varied than those of Whites. For instance, Asian Americans have higher family incomes than do Whites — $76,761 compared with $62,950 in 2015 — but their poverty rate is also higher than that of Whites — 11.4 percent compared with 9.1 percent in 2015.
Dr. Christian Weller, one of the report’s authors, is a University of Massachusetts Boston public policy professor and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. The latter organization released the report. A co-author is Dr. Jeffrey Thompson, principal economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
