Race and economic well-being in the United States

From Tyler Cowen.

"We construct a measure of consumption-equivalent welfare for Black and White Americans, which incorporates life expectancy, consumption, leisure, and inequality. Based on these factors, welfare for Black Americans was 40 percent of that for White Americans in 1984 and 59 percent by 2022. There has been remarkable progress for Black Americans: The level of their consumption-equivalent welfare increased by a factor of 3.5 over the last 38 years when aggregate consumption per person only doubled. Despite this progress, the welfare gap in 2022 remains disconcertingly large at 41 percent, much larger than the 16 percent gap in consumption per person.

That is from a new article by Jean-Félix Brouillette, Charles I. Jones, and Peter J. Klenow, just published in American Economic Journal: Insights."

It states that black "consumption-equivalent welfare increased by a factor of 3.5 over the last 38 year." It also states that it "40 percent of that for White Americans in 1984." 

So then I will assume that blacks in 1984 had a score of 40 and whites had a score of 100. But it is now (in 2022) 3.5 times higher for blacks. That would give them a score of 140, which is 40% higher than what whites had in 1984. That sounds pretty good because I have never heard anyone say that whites were suffering terribly in 1984.