In the process of developing researching the question of what kind of debt Americans are in today, I found some very interesting research about economic mobility in the United States. Research from a study published in 2007 indicates that not only do black families earn substantially less than white families, but also children from black families are much more likely to have a lower family income than their parents. From Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America:

“Economic Mobility of Black and
White Families” by Julia Isaacs

Throughout history blacks have had
lower median incomes and higher
poverty rates than whites in the United
States. Some progress in closing these
gaps has occurred, but the pace of
change has often been slow or even
moved in the wrong direction. While
Isaacs shows that median family incomes
have risen for both black and white
families over the past 30 years, they
have risen less for black families, in
part because of declines in the incomes
of black men combined with low
marriage rates in the black population.
The result was no steady progress
in reducing the family income gaps
between blacks and whites between
1974 and 2004. In 2004, median
family income of blacks ages 30 to 39
was only 58 percent that of white
families in the same age group.

That’s cause for concern already — that black families earn only 58 % of what white families earn, but wait, there’s more:

The data also reveal a significant
difference in the extent to which
black and white parents are able
to pass their economic advantages
onto their children. Isaacs finds that
not only are white children more likely
to surpass their parents’ income than
black children at a similar point in
the income distribution, but they are
also more likely to move up the ladder,
while black children are more likely
to fall down. Indeed almost half of
black children whose parents were
solidly middle class in the late 1960s
end up falling to the bottom of the
income distribution, compared to 16
percent of white children. And black
children from poor families have poorer
prospects than white children from
such families: more than half (54
percent) of black children born to
parents in the bottom quintile remain
there, compared to 31 percent of
white children.

There is still much work to be done
in this field, and Isaacs cautions that
the current analysis is hindered by the
small number of minority households
in the longitudinal surveys used to
measure intergenerational mobility.
She calls for analysis of additional
data sets as well as more extensive
research on factors contributing to
racial differences to better understand
the different mobility experiences of
blacks and whites.

I hope we can come to understand why economic mobility for black families appears to be in even worse condition than economic mobility for white families. I also wonder about the relative economic mobility for other ethnicities.