Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility

This paper documents sharp divergent trends in intergenerational economic mobility by race and class in the United States across the 1978 to 1992 birth cohorts, and investigates the causal mechanisms driving those changes. The core empirical facts are two: between 1978 and 1992 birth cohorts, the earnings gap between white children from high-income versus low-income families grew by approximately 28–30% (the “white class gap”), while the earnings gap between white and Black children from low-income families shrank by approximately 27–30% (the “white-Black race gap”). These twin trends — growing class gaps and shrinking race gaps — appear consistently across earnings, employment rates, educational attainment, SAT/ACT scores, incarceration, marriage, and mortality, and they hold in nearly every region of the country.

Benjamin Goldman | Macro Paper Warehouse

Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility