Duke University
After years of progress, the median earnings gap between black
and white men has returned to what it was in 1950, according to new research by
economists from Duke University and the University of Chicago.
The experience of African-American men is not uniform, though:
The earnings gap between black men with a college education and those with less
education is at an all-time high, the authors say.
The research appears online in the National Bureau of
Economic Research working paper series.
The paper looks at earnings for working-age men across a span of
75 years, from 1940 to 2014. The earnings gap between black and white men
narrowed during the civil rights era.
Then, starting around 1970, the gap
between black and white men's wages started widening once again.
"When it comes to the earnings gap between black and white
men, we've gone all the way back to 1950," said Duke economist Patrick
Bayer, who co-authored the paper with Kerwin Kofi Charles of the University of
Chicago.
The picture for black men looks very different at the top of the economic ladder versus the bottom, the authors say. Since the 1960s, top black salaries have continued to climb. Those advances were fueled by more equal access to universities and high-skilled professions, the study finds.
Meanwhile, a starkly different story transpired at the bottom of
the economic ladder. Massive increases in incarceration rates and the general
decline of working-class jobs have devastated the labor market prospects of men
with a high school degree or less, the authors say.
The changing economy has been hard on all workers with less than
a high school education, but especially devastating for black men, Bayer said.
"The broad economic changes we've seen since the 1970s have
clearly helped people at the top of the ladder," Bayer said. "But the
labor market for low-skilled workers has basically collapsed.
"Back in 1940 there were plenty of jobs for men with less
than a high school degree. Now education is more and more a determinant of
who's working and who's not."
In fact, more and more working-age men in the United States
aren't working at all.
The number of nonworking white men grew from about 8
percent in 1960 to 17 percent in 2014.
The numbers look still worse among black
men: In 1960, 19 percent of black men were not working; in 2014, that number
had grown to 35 percent of black men.
That includes men who are incarcerated as
well those who can't find jobs.
"The rate at which men are not working has been
skyrocketing, and it's not simply the result of the Great Recession,"
Bayer said. "It's a big part of what's been happening to our economy over
the past 40 years."
The situation would be even worse if not for educational gains
among African-Americans over the past 75 years, Bayer said.
On average, black men today have many more years of schooling
than black men of the past, and the education gap between white and black men
has shrunk considerably. Nevertheless, a gap remains: These days, black men
have about a year's less education than white men, on average.
"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.
The findings show the need for renewed focus on closing racial
gaps in education and school quality, which have been stuck in place for
several decades, according to the authors.
They also suggest that any economic
changes that improve prospects for all low-skilled workers will have the
important side effect of reducing racial economic inequality.
"We clearly need to create better job opportunities for
everyone in the lower rungs of the economic ladder, where work has become
increasingly hard to come by," Bayer said.
Find the report online at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22797
