Harvard Study Indicates Black/White Wealth Gap Decreased Among Gen X, Millennials

According to the researchers, one possible direction that policymakers could pursue is creating policies that would encourage mobility in general by investing in schools or youth mentorship programs and changing zoning restrictions or school district boundaries, which have been shown to exacerbate existing income inequality through a concept called income segregation.

A Harvard study released on July 25 indicates that while the Black/white wealth gap has shrunk between Generation X and millennials, the gap between low and high-income white adults has widened, marked by an improvement in economic mobility for low-income Black children as well as a decline in earning for low-income white children.

According to NBC News, the change in income levels is largely attributed to increased employment rates of Black parents.

As the researchers told NBC News, “Outcomes improve…for children who grow up in communities with increasing parental employment rates, with larger effects for children who move to such communities at younger ages.”

According to the study, Black people from low-income families also had regional differences play into the data; there was more economic mobility in the southeast and the industrial Midwest than in parts of the East or West coasts and the Great Plains.

The researchers state, “Importantly, social communities are shaped not just by where people live but by race and class within neighborhoods,” the researchers told NBC News. “One approach to increasing opportunity is, therefore, to increase connections between communities.”

Although the research is mostly positive on the front of economic mobility, it does point out that the probability of social mobility from poverty to the top tier of the income pyramid increases by nearly 9% if you are white.

According to the study, “Economic mobility can change within relatively short periods of time. While previous research suggested the importance of targeting policy interventions at the neighborhood level, this study further identifies patterns of change at the community level as shaped by not only neighborhood, but by race, class and cohort. These findings provide new data to understand how and where places are changing over time that may be used to inform policy focused on improving economic mobility.”