Talk:Transformative asset

This "article" is nothing more than a political pamphlet.

I vote to simply delete it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.214.12.178 (talk) 07:51, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Most of this article is preaching about social justice. Or as Obama calls it “redistribution”. Why is there a conclusion included in this article? It fails to mention the correlation between wealth and having the self-discipline to not spend all your money on chrome wheels. Or having the self-discipline to wait to have children until you are not a child. Or having the self-discipline to only sire two children.


 * I agree this article is a mess, though for other reasons. It amounts to the dual claims that having wealth is good, and that African Americans are less likely than European Americans to be wealthy. I suppose the first claim is obvious, and I'm inclined to believe the second, too. But:
 * It fails to distinguish between wealth and transformative assets. Is there a difference, and if so, what? (On the other hand, the distinction between wealth and income seems useless - transformative assets are not income, we don't need an entire paragraph on that subject.)
 * The references are sloppy. For example, we explicitly give Michael Sherraden as reference for what someone says in Shapiro's book. Is that supposed to be Sherraden's book, or should we cite Shapiro's book?
 * The text is riddled with weasel words such as "for the most part", "a large variety of statistics show", "children in White or affluent families typically have parents that...", "some parents", ... Do we have actual figures to back that up, or is it all hot air?
 * The grammar sometimes is so deformed that sentences take on a strange meaning. Take the "children in White or affluent families". Do we really mean that children in White, non-affluent families also have parents who set up bonds etc? Or "Housing and inheritance are the two most common sources of wealth in the US." Do we mean that? Do people really become wealthy by owning a house? Don't we mean that housing is one of the most common forms of wealth? Huon (talk) 16:01, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Almost the whole article based on a single source
Almost every citation is from The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality. This article presents POV as fact based on a single source. It needs more sources and NPOV'ing. Kwertii (talk) 22:27, 5 February 2009 (UTC)


 * While I agree that more sources would surely help, could you be a little more precise? What POV is presented as fact? Is there another POV out there? Yours, Huon (talk) 02:51, 6 February 2009 (UTC)


 * This article is a an absolute joke saying that white people save money as they have more and black americans "Live from cheque to cheque" this is an outrageous claim I would agree that the white population have more wealth than the black population however to make claims like this is downright purile if you used this as a reference you wouldnt believe there where any poor white americans. The refernce basically explains it all its a rant more than anything else. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.19.42.221 (talk) 05:48, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Thinkly veiled ad for one author

 * This article is a thinly veiled ad for a single book. The book itself is, to put it mildly, of questionable economic validity.: —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ichudov (talk • contribs) 17:11, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Should we cut this down?
This page covers quite a useful topic, but the content is, as identified above, kind of appalling. Could we cut this down to a stub to explain the basic concepts and leave it open for further development? Apologies if this is completely against policy, I'm out of practice. Rupa zero (talk) 18:45, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Merger proposal
Given the many concerns raised above, I propose merging this page into Thomas Shapiro as a subsection. There's almost no content here from secondary sources, and with no relevant discussion to quote from, there's no reason for us to have this concept as a stand-alone article. A quick search of Google Books and Scholar show only sparing use of the concept, and little detailed discussion of it as a concept. -- Khazar2 (talk) 16:30, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Having gotten no response at either article, I've boldly done the move. If this article is recreated in the future, please make sure that it draws on reliable secondary sources per Wikipedia policy. -- Khazar2 (talk) 02:59, 24 October 2012 (UTC)