WRITING in 1978, William Julius Wilson, an influential sociologist, began a controversy in “The Declining Significance of Race.” Mr Wilson argued that the plight of poor black Americans was due more to labour-market forces than to contemporary racial discrimination. “I wanted to call attention to the worsening condition of the black underclass, in both absolute and relative terms, by relating it to the improving position of the black middle class,” he later wrote. Four decades later a bevy of economic studies provide some vindication for Mr Wilson. While highly educated African-Americans are now more successful than ever, the bottom appears to have fallen out for poor blacks. Although the earnings gap between the typical white and black man began narrowing from 1940, the trend stopped in the mid-1970s. Many assume that the earnings gap then stayed constant, but it has in fact widened. Today the difference is as large as it was in the 1950s.
That is one result from a recent working paper by the...Continue reading
Source: United States https://ift.tt/2MQC9Qd
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