In your case, it won't. You would be better off renting and investing the extra $2k in assets that are productive rather than speculative. This should be obvious, but the West as a whole has bought into the housing as a form of wealth and can't let the music stop now without ruining millions of lives.
Housing as a form of generational wealth is a trick that works for the population as a whole for a generation or two. The majority of rentals come from regular people who bought long before you and have significantly lower mortgages or no mortgages at all, or large firms who have access to lower rates and more accounting tricks like depreciation. In either case, what they can afford to accept as rents is a lot less than what you can afford to accept as rent. The best you can hope for is significant appreciation or significant rent increases in the face of stagnant wages. High demand markets like NYC and SF can sustain ever increasing prices for a long time, but most markets cannot.
You’re not underpaid but you could make more by switching companies. Some companies simply pay more than others for the same role, level, and responsibilities because they’re engineering driven or better funded or more successful or operate at greater scale/profitability.
Any hot tech startup or FANG company or newish enterprise SaaS (Snowflake) or previous unicorn (AirBnB, Lyft) can pay those numbers total compensation for a SWE with 4+ years experience. Apply to all of them and see what you can get.
Who said these people aren’t working? I see a lot of people retraining, pivoting, and taking care of others. That’s work. Just because it doesn’t pay doesn’t mean it isn’t work or valuable. Being a stay at home parent doesn’t pay, but it’s clearly valuable.
Employment is a means to an end: basic survival. We do it because we’re forced to by forced scarcity. There may be virtue in work, but there’s no inherent virtue in employment.
So Blacks aren’t a “real people”? Is your actual argument that African-Americans don’t exist as a distinct ethnic group? If that’s your argument you should say so.
Let’s bring in an academic to this discussion.
Someone already linked the AP guidelines, but I’ll quote an actual professor with a background in this kind of stuff.
Here’s quote from an article written by John McWhorter, a prominent Black conservative who happens to be a professor of English and linguistics at Stanford the subject[1]:
“But what about the black business districts that thrived across the country after slavery was abolished? What about Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright and Thurgood Marshall, none born in Africa and all deeply American people? And while we're on Marshall, what about the civil rights revolution, a moral awakening that we gave to ourselves and the nation.”
“My roots trace back to working-class Black people - Americans, not foreigners - and I'm proud of it. I am John Hamilton McWhorter the Fifth. Four men with my name and appearance, doing their best in a segregated America, came before me. They and their dearest are the heritage that I can feel in my heart, and they knew the sidewalks of Philadelphia and Atlanta, not Sierra Leone.”
“So, we will have a name for ourselves - and it should be Black. "Colored" and "Negro" had their good points but carry a whiff of Plessy vs. Ferguson and Bull Connor about them, so we will let them lie. "Black" isn't perfect, but no term is.”
Are you better qualified to say whether Black should or shouldn’t be capitalized than a Black English and linguistics professor at Stanford? Is your take more academic than his? And if so on what basis? Because it doesn’t seem to be based context or history or what Black people call or have called themselves.
My claim and one his claims is simple: there is a culturally distinct group within America that is called African-American and Black and that the B should be capitalized. Whether The better is Black or African-American is up for debate but only within the African-American community. It’s our right to determine what the proper term is. In the meantime, the consensus is that you should capitalize the B in Black when referring to black Americans who descended from black slaves in America.
Black when capitalized doesn’t refer to a race.
It refers to an ethnicity. It’s not a retcon to capitalize ethnicities. We’ve been capitalizing ethnicities for a while now.
Black is an overloaded term. It’s a race and an ethnicity. If you were to write about black people in Africa, it would be nonsensical to capitalize it because black doesn’t communicate any shared identity in that context. The right granularity is national, ethnic, or tribal.
But Black is a cultural identity in the context of the United States. Blacks, or African-Americans, are ethnically distinct and have shared history, culture, and language. In 1840, almost all blacks in America were slaves. In 1950, almost all blacks were descendants of slaves. At either time, almost all of them would have spoken English as their first language. At either time, most would have been born in the American South. Most importantly, at either time would have identified with each other on the basis of those shared traits.
Whites, on the other hand, are comprised of distinct ethnic groups and had their own communities throughout American history. Go to any major American city and you’ll find neighborhoods that are historically Italian, Irish, or German.
It’s common to capitalize ethnicities and Black is an ethnicity in the United States. White is considered a race. Is your issue that Black is capitalized or that white is not capitalized?
There is an argument that this sentiment explains a lot of America’s strange choices as it relates to publicly funded everything.
It certainly seems like a lot of our divestment in community resources followed the end of Jim Crow. It would explain the strange bedfellows that are wealthy elites and white supremacists (who lean Republican; obviously not all Republicans are racist). The elite gets the benefit of lower taxes and new business revenue from privatization of former government services; the racist gets knowledge that people they dislike are being hurt more than them. It’s a win-win.
You can take advantage of people when they’re in dire straits. That’s not indicative of some greater truth about the price of labor but a fact of exploitation.
What jobs have natural job security? Either you’re protected by a union, a professional association, or having a rare and valuable skill set. The unions have been busted, professional associations are exclusive by their nature and most people definitionally do not have rare and marketable skills. As a result, an increasingly large fraction of jobs are gig work, part-time, or on contract. That includes work in law and software engineering. Precarity is the natural state of an unregulated, de-unionized job market and it is not a bug but a feature. It has little to do with our public schools.
> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves.
At some point automation will leave us in a place where many, if not most, people’s labor is literally worthless because they’re not mechanics or engineers. Then what? Should those people starve even as we live in a time of abundance instead of scarcity? At what point does this concept of deservedness do more harm than good?
I won't repeat my claims here, but I'll add that at this point, at least part of that overrepresentation is self-perpetuating. Many people expect the next Michael Jordan to look like Michael Jordan. That's why Armon Johnson was almost a first round draft pick in 2010 while Jeremy Lin got passed over completely despite the fact that Jeremy Lin is clearly talented by any objective measure.
I'm also uncertain that: 1) cognitive and physical development have the same inhibitors and 2) those inhibitors affect cognition and physical development to the same extent. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that lead hurts the brain more than the rest of the body.
Getting rid of advanced classes does nothing to solve the real problem: different kids have wildly different resources/home lives and those differences often cut across racial lines. Want to fix large difference in racial makeup between regular and advanced classes? Implement universal pre-K. Give all children free breakfast, lunch, and dinner that's healthy. Give parents $700 per child. Mandate that all homes have safe drinking water free of lead. Put social workers, psychologists, and nurses in schools. Tackle the material circumstances that tend to stifle a child's development and the rest will follow. Canceling classes doesn't do anything for anyone.
Housing as a form of generational wealth is a trick that works for the population as a whole for a generation or two. The majority of rentals come from regular people who bought long before you and have significantly lower mortgages or no mortgages at all, or large firms who have access to lower rates and more accounting tricks like depreciation. In either case, what they can afford to accept as rents is a lot less than what you can afford to accept as rent. The best you can hope for is significant appreciation or significant rent increases in the face of stagnant wages. High demand markets like NYC and SF can sustain ever increasing prices for a long time, but most markets cannot.