On Apr 10, 8:36 pm, NewsToBeRead <NewsToBeR...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119492563733591022.html?mod=hpp_us_wh...
>
> Blacks Trail in Growth of Income
>
> Study Finds Parents' Gains
> May Not Protect Children
> As Whites Seem to Benefit
>
> By GREG IP
> November 13, 2007; Page A4
>
> Blacks born into the middle class in the late 1960s are far more
> likely than whites to earn less than their parents, a new study of
> economic mobility has found.
>
> The study examined how children born in the late 1960s fared in the
> late 1990s and early 2000s. Overall, it found that two-thirds of the
> adult children earned more, adjusted for inflation, than their parents
> did at the same age in the late 1960s.
>
> But when the study examined families by race and their rank by income,
> they found stark differences between black and white families.
>
> Children of black parents earning in the middle 20% of all families in
> the late 1960s had a 69% chance of earning less than their parents,
> the study found. For white children, that chance was just 32%.
>
> "Economic success in the parental generation...does not appear to
> protect black children from future economic adversity the same way it
> protects white children," the study's author, Julia Isaacs, a scholar
> at the Brookings Institution, writes in the re****t, to be released
> today.
>
> The study doesn't develop its own explanations for the disparity. But
> Ms. Isaacs says other research has raised several possibilities. One
> is that black parents have less wealth, in the form of homes or other
> assets, than white parents of the same income, which might affect the
> economic prospects of their children. Another is that marriage rates
> are lower for blacks than for whites, so black children may be more
> likely to grow up to be single parents.
>
> Yet another theory is that in the 1960s, black women were more likely
> to work than white women, and thus black incomes received less of a
> boost as women's overall participation in the labor force rose in
> subsequent years.
>
> The re****t is part of a continuing examination of economic mobility
> conducted under the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trusts, with
> contributions from Brookings, the American Enterprise Institute, the
> Heritage Foundation and the Urban Institute.
>
> The study used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, run by
> academics with federal funding, which has been following several
> thousand sets of parents and children since the 1960s. The study's
> sample comprised 2,367 individuals between the ages of birth and 18 in
> 1968; their median family income in 2006 was $71,900, up 29%, after
> inflation adjustment, from the median income of their parents'
> generation.
>
> Its findings may both contradict and reinforce Americans' image of
> their society as highly mobile. On the one hand, it found that
> parents' income ranking was a strong determinant of their child's. For
> parents born into the bottom 20%, 42% of children were also in the
> bottom 20% four decades later. For parents born into the top 20%, 39%
> of their children were also there four decades later. On the other
> hand, that means the majority of children ended up in a different
> income quintile than their parents.
>
> Moreover, the poorest children were the likeliest to do better than
> their parents: 82% of the children of parents in the bottom quintile
> earned more as adults than their parents did; that was true of just
> 66% of children of parents in the middle quintile, and 43% of children
> of parents in the top quintile. Ms. Isaacs says it is easier to move
> up from the bottom than the top.
>
> But Ms. Isaacs says the experience is quite different depending on
> race. For white families, 90% of children born to parents in the
> bottom 20% earned more by adulthood; for black families, it was 73%.
> In the middle quintile, commonly referred to as the middle class, 68%
> of white children grew up to earn more than their parents, but just
> 31% of black children did.
>
> "Black children and white children do not have equal chances of moving
> up the income ladder," Ms. Isaacs writes.
>
> Write to Greg Ip at greg...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
I wonder how the study was conducted. Do we have
information on that?
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