The latest in a series of important reports on social mobility by the research group Opportunity Insights is out, and it’s another conversation-changer. Across a variety of outcomes in adulthood and adolescence, the gap between black Americans who grew up with low-income parents and their white counterparts has narrowed over time.
This news is certainly welcome, but don’t pop those champagne bottles too quickly. Despite the important progress, the report provides ample reason to think that unacceptable levels of racial inequality and limited upward mobility will be with us for a long time yet.
For one, black outcomes over the study period—2005 to 2019, when adults were 27 years old—actually worsened on several of the measures examined by economist Raj Chetty and his coauthors. They just didn’t deteriorate as badly as among white kids raised poor. This was true of average and median household income, reaching the top fifth of household income, getting married, mothers being married, and mortality. Moreover, whites who grew up poor did considerably worse. We looked at 24 outcomes the researchers considered, and whites improved only on high school graduation.
Second, the reduction in black-white opportunity gaps leaves a long way to go. The gap in mean household income fell by about $5,900 over these 14 years, but that left a $14,900 gap, which is equal to 37 percent of the average white 27-year-olds’ income. The black mean in 2019 was 63 percent of the white mean, compared with 57 percent in 2005. Black kids raised poor have a 4 percent chance of reaching the top fifth of household income, while 15 percent of their white counterparts will end up there. The gap in marriage rates narrowed by a third, but that was because rates fell so much more for whites raised poor than for blacks. Nonetheless, in 2019, it was still the case that 27 percent of whites, but only 7 percent of blacks, who grew up poor had found a spouse at age 27.
Perhaps no data point in the report better conveys the persistence of black-white inequality than the finding that essentially no county in the United States has an average income for black adults raised poor that is as high as the average for white adults raised poor. In 2019, in only 3 percent of the 1,527 counties for which data are available did black children have higher mean household income than white children conditional on being raised at the 25th percentile. That is, blacks do worse than whites, on average, essentially everywhere, even when confining to those who grow up poor.
And that brings us to a final caution: black children are far more likely to be raised at the 25th percentile than white children. The report’s authors write, “if Black children are less likely to climb the income ladder relative to their parents compared to white children, racial disparities in income will persist in the long run irrespective of current income levels.” However, even if black children have the same upward mobility rate as white children, given that black and white children start out with a vastly different likelihood of being poor, racial disparities will remain staggering for some time.
For example, in a paper we wrote with Katherine Guyot of the Brookings Institution, looking at adults born in the early 1980s, we found that 42 percent of black men and 46 percent of black women were raised in the bottom fifth of family income—compared with just 12 percent of white men and 14 percent of white women.
We can update those results using the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. In 1978, 14 percent of white infants were born to families in the bottom fifth of income. By 1992, that had fallen slightly to 12 percent. Among black infants—the same cohorts as in the Opportunity Insights paper—the share was 51 percent in 1978 and 51 percent in 1992. If anything, the black-white gap in starting out poor increased slightly.
What the Opportunity Insight results really say is that outcome gaps between the bottom half of black kids and the bottom 10-15 percent of white kids have narrowed. That’s undoubtedly good, but it is consistent with excruciatingly slow progress reducing overall black-white inequality.
Compounding the problem, blacks not only continue to have lower upward mobility out of poverty than whites, but higher downward mobility into poverty. The paper reports that by 2019, the gap in staying in the bottom fifth—conditional on starting there—had narrowed considerably. That gap was 14.7 percentage points in 2005, but just 4.1 points in 2019. The gap in falling to the bottom fifth conditional on starting out in the middle fifth also narrowed. But it was still the case that whites raised in the middle-class faced a 16 percent chance of falling to the bottom fifth, versus 25 percent for black middle-class children. Only 11 percent of whites starting in the top fifth of household income fell to the bottom fifth, but nearly twice as many (19 percent) of blacks did.
So while racial disparities for kids with the same parental income are narrowing, they persist. When combined with gaps in the likelihood of starting out poor, they suggest racial inequality will be with us for a long time. In work with other researchers, we looked at adults in their thirties in 2019. We found that while one in 100 white adults were in their third straight generation of being in the bottom fifth of income, that was true of one in five black adults.
Like Americans generally, our preferred approaches to reducing this inequality only partly overlap. But the cause of achieving racial equality should remain a pressing one for Americans of all political stripes.