If you wonder about poverty, if you think about generational wealth, consider these ideas about the development of the U.S. from Mark Bittman's Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food from Sustainable to Suicidal:
"In all, more than a quarter of all the nation's land was given away or sold for cheap, and since much of that total (two billion acres) is unfarmable mountains or desert, that quarter represents the majority of arable land. If you are looking for the roots of today's income inequality, you might start here, with a federal donation of land--the foundation of most wealth--to an exclusive club of white men" (p. 81).
Bittman then discusses the aftermath of the Civil War and how formerly enslaved people got some land and then lost their land. He also discusses the Homestead Act, and all the people who couldn't take advantage of it, a fact I did not know before.
He concludes: "Had there been a fair redistribution of land in the last third of the nineteenth century, one that acknowledged the rights of Indigenous people, of women, of formerly enslaved people, and of other people of color, the twentieth century would have looked much different, with millions of additional small and medium farms run by families concerned about their land, the food they grew, and the communities around them. Instead, the federal government joined with former slaveholders to establish a system that remained unjust, and that increasingly focused on cash crops and monoculture" (pp. 83-84).
I have just started thinking about this dynamic of land distribution throughout history--I imagine that if we looked deeply, we'd see similar patterns in other countries. It's an interesting way of understanding why some groups are ahead in terms of wealth, while the rest have been left behind.
Now if only I could see an elegant solution to this injustice . . .
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