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Some socio-economic gaps between blacks and whites in the U.S. are widening again, according to two studies presented Sunday in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Economic Assn.
Case in point: infant mortality. Deaths for both whites and blacks dropped for most of the 20th century, but at different rates. The gap narrowed significantly in the 1940s, widened in the 1950s, and then shrank again in the 1960s, according to statistics presented by Kenneth Chay and Michael Greenstone of the University of California at Berkeley. They focused on the 1960s' drop, attributing it to progress in the War on Poverty.
But the most striking statistic -- which the authors didn't attempt to analyze -- is that the gap between whites and blacks has been rising steadily for the last 30 years. Today, it is at its widest point since 1900. The chance that a black child will die in infancy is nearly twice the chance that a white child will die in infancy.
LESS IMPRESSIVE.
A study on income gaps put in a different light the usual story that the spread between hourly earnings of black and white men has been steadily narrowing since 1940. According to the typically cited statistics, black men's hourly earnings rose from 44% of whites' in 1940 to 79% in 1990. But doctoral student Amitabh Chandra of the University of Kentucky said blacks' progress is less impressive when you take into account that a growing percentage of blacks are incarcerated or otherwise out of the labor force, and thus not counted in the black wage averages. For instance, a recent Princeton University study concluded that one-third of black men aged 20-40 without a high school education are behind bars.
According to Chandra, if you attempt to measure what unemployed black men's wages would have been if they were working, the average hourly black wage in 1990 was just 72% -- rather than 79% -- of the white wage. And most of that progress was made from 1940 to 1950, when blacks' percentage of white income rose from 43% to 60%.
Economics, by the way, is one of the professions that has relatively few blacks. Of the four presenters and four discussants at the session on "Economic Well-Being of African-Americans," none was black. And in the audience of 30, only one was black.
Peter Coy at the American Economic Assn. meeting in Boston EDITED BY DOUGLAS HARBRECHT
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