January 18, 2005

I'd like to admit an error: it turns-out that in one of my essays, I said that African-American men get less out of Social Security owing to shorter lifespans. Apparently, I'd been misled as this editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune explains.

A GAO report said that: "In the aggregate, blacks and Hispanics have higher disability rates and lower lifetime earnings, and thus receive greater benefits relative to taxes [paid] than whites." Of course, having higher disability rates and lower lifetime earnings is not a good thing...

So I'd swallowed a false argument which, nonetheless, seemed completely plausible. However-- I wonder what a gender-based analysis would show? Women (so it is claimed) have lower lifetime earnings (which is only meaningful if you forget about the fact that they often have access to their spouses' incomes) and lower disability rates (owing to oh-so superior genes or so they claim), and they often inherit whatever surpluses their spouses had after they die. And over a lifetime, women spend more money on women than they do on men and men spend more money on women than they do on men. Black men do not typically enjoy any of those advantages, so it's implausible to claim that women are in the same boat as black men..

Anyway, this is a fairly complex issue and I apologize if my own mistake had misled anyone.