Bank of America just launched a zero down payment mortgage in 21 cities

Quick reminder to everyone in the thread that this isn't an example of reverse racism, which doesn't exist, nor is it an example of racism, which would require that BofA consider Black and Latino mortgage seekers as superior to Whites based on their race.

Not to be all Eeyore, but it's a little exhausting to have any post about any race-conscious action get bogged down by commenters who haven't even read the Wikipedia pages for racism and reverse racism. There's an interesting discussion to be had about these kinds of policies:

- housing as infinitely growing store of wealth is probably bad, is it a good idea to get more people on that train? Is it unfair to effectively bar Black and Latino mortgage seekers from the gravy train?

- is it a good idea to do this now, as we're descending further into a housing crisis, or are these markets more liquid than others

- what are other non-credit-score measures of creditworthiness? Is credit even a good idea? Should the government just back things like mortgages, school, and auto loans?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_racism

I am not commenting on anything to do with the discussion at hand, purely just commenting on Wikipedia and the idea of "primary sources."

Wikipedia articles are not really vetted by any authority nor are the sources. Anyone can simply add citations to claims; there are no standards for what constitutes a valid source other than a URL exists to some resource.

You can even take a benign article about something that is not political and start clicking through the sources and realize a lot of them don't support the claim they were cited to support on Wikipedia. In my experience, its less than half the sources I've clicked on are credible and support the claim but this is anecdotal. A lot of Wikipedia is editing by people with ulterior motives now that its so often presented and received as fact.

So? That's how research/research culture works. People mock the [Citation Needed] culture on Wikipedia but it is still far better than "no sources presented". Wikipedia knows that it can't be "objective" so long as it is edited by people with "ulterior motives" and the usual other biasing faults of being merely human. The tools that Wikipedia has to counter that are requiring sources to be cited so that future editors have tools to dispute the claims and by doing that in large aggregate policy they hope to "trend better" over time.

I point out the primary sources part of Wikipedia especially because I very much understand Wikipedia is edited by humans with all their quirks and faults and it is worth not just starting at Wikipedia, but also all that "boring footnotes part" at the bottom of almost every Wikipedia page. Even if it has the same problems as the rest of the data in Wikipedia, it's still so much more information beyond the top-paragraph summary which is all many people ever read of Wikipedia. But critically, that's the part of Wikipedia that most embodies the "Reading Rainbow spirit" of "but you don't have to take my word for it". That's where Wikipedia itself reminds you that it isn't the final word on a subject, but the first word, the summarizing word on it, and points you to other places to explore.

Even if "less than half the sources are credible", a .490 can be a startlingly good batting average, depending on if you are talking Baseball or Cricket. In this specific case 50% of 107 is still a chance at maybe 54 good and worthwhile and credible supporting claims. That's still 54 different places more to start your own research with than you had before you got to the Wikipedia page. Even though anyone can add citations to claims, it's still far more organized than "let me google that for you" because it's still likely human curated and not just whatever SEO has made the machine algorithms happy this day. It's still a good suggestion to start there with those sources. If you are arguing that you maybe shouldn't stop there, then absolutely, I agree, but the above poster was asking where to start, and the poster above that gave them one place to start with 107 leads of further places to start. I thought that was a useful reminder, regardless of what you think the overall batting average of Wikipedia is.

It's easy to hand-wave the discussion away by citing a bunch of links, but taking a gander over that Wikipedia page seems to verify much of what I stated about bad statistics. Much of what's mentioned is comparing the median of giant groups rather than making an apples to apples comparison.

That's the same bad statistical approach that lets activists claim that women make a fraction of what men make: they compare the incomes of all women to all men rather than taking into account individual choices, education, career fields, etc. When you do a good comparison (comparing women with equivalent careers, education, ages, etc to men) the wage gap between men and women is blurred.

For this question about Black loans, all I'm interested in is an apples to apples comparison. Compare loan rates of Black people in X career with X education making $XXX with XXX+ credit scores to the White, Latino, and Asian equivalent. That's the better approach to see if bias exists. Does that study exist? You tell me because I'd be interested in it.

Agreed--there is potential in seven years, fallout from this will be dubbed as racially-targetted, predatory lending, and it would be difficult to argue with.

Prior to the 2008 housing crisis Bush made big push for home-ownership ("ownership society") for everyone, and we saw the subsequent hordes of zero down payment mortgages, etc.