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The American Dream is part of the allure of America – freedom, equality, and opportunity, owning land, rising to middle class status, children being better off financially than you. Lets focus on the last description – having your children being better off financially than you. The Pew Economic Mobility Project to ensure the American Dream is kept alive reports that children being better off financially than you is the third most important part of the American Dream behind being free to acomplish anything and being free to say or do what you want. The findings of the Economic Mobility Project (published 2008) found a frightening difference between the black and white children being better off financially than their parents.
At each income level, black children are less likely to have higher income than their parents than their white counterparts. In addition to being less likely than white children to exceed their parents income, black children of the middle and fourth quintile of parent’s income (middle and upper-middle class) actually earn less income than their parents in inflation-adjusted dollars. This finding suggests that once blacks reach the middle class, they experience diffculties to continue to improve financially. This is in sharp contrast to the traditional American expectation.
The study also reveals that 45 percent of black children whose parents were solidly middle income end up falling to the bottom income quintile, while only 16 percent of white children born to parents in the middle income group make the same descent. This trend holds throughout the rest of the income levels as well as 48 percent of black children opposed to 20 percent of white children descend from the second-to-bottom income group to the bottom group, and 54 percent of black children stay in the lowest income group opposed to 31 percent of white children.
The conclusions of the report state “The findings for black children born to middle-income parents may be more startling [than the other findings]. Many middle-income black parents have seen their children’s incomes fall below their own; and disturbingly high numbers of black children have fallen from the middle to the bottom of the income distribution. Economic success in the parential generation – at least as measured by family income – does not appear to protect black children from future economic adversity the same way it protects white children“.
Overall, blacks experience loss upward mobility and more downward mobility than whites. If having your children be better off financially than you is one of the most important parts of the American Dream, the American Dream is slowly becoming less of a reality for blacks.
To read the full report, visit http://www.economicmobility.org/reports_and_research/mobility_in_america
Do these findings surprise you? What do you think we can do to address and reverse this trend? Please share your comments in the section below.
