Black-white earnings gap returns to 1950 levels in US

After decades of progress, the earnings gap between black and white men in the US has returned to what it was in 1950, according to a new study.
The earnings gap narrowed during the civil rights era. Then, starting around 1970, the gap between black and white men's wages started widening once again, said economists from Duke University and the University of Chicago in the US.
The experience of African-American men is not uniform, though - the earnings gap between black men with a college education and those with less education is at an all-time high, they said.
The study looks at earnings for working-age men across a span of 75 years, from 1940 to 2014.

"When it comes to the earnings gap between black and white men, we have gone all the way back to 1950," said Patrick Bayer, economist at Duke.
The picture for black men looks very different at the top of the economic ladder versus the bottom, said researchers.

Since the 1960s, top black salaries have continued to climb. Those advances were fuelled by more equal access to universities and high-skilled professions, they added.
Meanwhile, a starkly different story transpired at the bottom of the economic ladder.
Massive increases in incarceration rates and the general decline of working-class jobs have devastated the labour market prospects of men with a high school degree or less.

The changing economy has been hard on all workers with less than a high school education, but especially devastating for black men, said Bayer.
"The broad economic changes we have seen since the 1970s have clearly helped people at the top of the ladder. But the labour market for low-skilled workers has basically collapsed," he said.
"Back in 1940 there were plenty of jobs for men with less than a high school degree. Now education is more and more a determinant of who's working and who's not," he added.
In fact, more and more working-age men in the US are not working at all. The number of non-working white men grew from about 8 per cent in 1960 to 17 per cent in 2014.

The numbers look still worse among black men - in 1960, 19 per cent of black men were not working; in 2014, that number had grown to 35 per cent of black men.
That includes men who are incarcerated as well those who cannot find jobs.
"The rate at which men are not working has been skyrocketing, and it is not simply the result of the Great Recession. It is a big part of what has been happening to our economy over the past 40 years," he said.
The situation would be even worse if not for educational gains among African-Americans over the past 75 years.

On average, black men today have many more years of schooling than black men of the past, and the education gap between white and black men has shrunk considerably.
The study appears in the journal National Bureau of Economic Research.