Racial Economic Convergence with ‘Deliberate Speed’: Generational Mobility and the Role of School Quality

• In Event: Studying Integrated Spaces and the Policies that Support Them

Abstract

Racial economic convergence in the US has proceeded at a glacial pace (Margo, 2016; Bayer et al 2021). If there were no racial differences in socioeconomic mobility from one generation to the next (i.e., if black Americans experienced the same rates of generational mobility as their white counterparts), the speed of racial economic convergence would be more than twice the observed rate experienced from 1870-2010 (Margo, 2016). In other words, racial disparities in income declined at less than half the speed that would have been expected over the past 150 years if there were not such large racial differences in generation mobility. What explains the slow speed of racial economic convergence and accounts for why the socioeconomic success of black Americans have consistently and substantially lagged behind those of white Americans who began their lives in otherwise comparable familial economic circumstances?

This chapter provides a synthesis of racial differences in generational mobility and discusses the best available evidence on black-white gaps in upward mobility, downward mobility, and in multigenerational poverty across three generations.1 This will include discussion of analyses that examine the root causes of these racial disparities in socioeconomic mobility and the causal role of school quality and neighborhood effects on the generational mobility process. The paper will give particular attention to the ways in which parental wealth and segregation influence access to opportunity and the transmission of socioeconomic status across generations.

The paper will provide a multigenerational framework for considering the contextual features that inhibit or facilitate intergenerational mobility and poverty persistence, to better illuminate what factors explain why black Americans consistently experience less upward and more downward mobility than whites do. Clues to the puzzle are informed by the pattern observed in every American metropolitan area that black and white families with children who have identical household income routinely reside in neighborhoods that look nothing alike in terms of available resources. The paper discusses the empirical challenges that accompany the estimation of mobility rates across three or more generations; and outlines promising directions for future research.

Author

• Rucker C. Johnson, University of California, Berkeley
  Presenting Author