In the study, Charles, the Edwin and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor and interim dean at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, and Bayer take an innovative look at federal data on the earnings of African-American and white men from 1940 through the Great Recession.
Their results provide a sobering picture of the persistence of income inequality for the vast majority of African Americans. The researchers also found the wage gap closing swiftly at the top of the earnings scale, suggesting that targeted, race-specific policies have been effective in expanding access to top-tier educational opportunities and high-wage professions.
The researchers also included “zeroes” in their analysis-men who are not part of the workforce and who have zero earnings. The resulting analysis captures the impacts of rapidly rising income inequality in the United States and provides a much starker representation of the widening gap between most African-American and white men.
“It’s astounding that, in terms of economic rank, a black man in the middle of his economic distribution is no closer to his white counterpart in terms of earnings than was his grandfather,” Charles said.
Today, roughly one of every eight U.S. males considered prime earners is not working. That number is one of three for African-American men. “Zeroes are growing for everybody, but they are growing more for blacks, and they are growing more for blacks in every dimension,” Charles said.
One major driver of the decline in workforce participation among African Americans has been the implementation of government policies over the past five decades that have resulted in mass incarceration. “Jail has had a terrible effect on young men, especially young African-American men,” Charles said. “You could think of incarceration policy as sweeping ever-larger numbers of men-particularly less-skilled men-out of small positive earnings into zeroes.”
African-American men also have been hit hard by the collapse of U.S. manufacturing, which once was a leading source of middle-income jobs for those with lower levels of education. “Back in 1940, there were plenty of jobs for men with less than a high school degree,” Bayer said. “Now education is more and more a determinant of who’s working and who’s not. The labor market for low-skilled workers has basically collapsed.”
Race-specific advancements
“In essence, the economic benefits that should have come from the substantial gains in education for black men over the past 75 years have been completely undone by the changing economy, which exacts an ever-steeper price for the differences that still remain,” Bayer said.
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