Working-Class Whites Anxiously Losing Ground

Blue collar white voters continue to make up Donald Trump’s base.  This is especially true for rural voters.  They are often portrayed in the mainstream media as too uneducated to know better.  Some have attributed the working-class affinity ,for the...

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Blue collar white voters continue to make up Donald Trump’s base.  This is especially true for rural voters.  They are often portrayed in the mainstream media as too uneducated to know better.  Some have attributed the working-class affinity ,for the Republican Party to their anger and bitterness over feeling “left behind.”

Dismissing these perceptions, craven politicians have called them the “deplorables,” as Hilary Clinton labeled them, or the “bitter clingers” as Barack Obama viewed them. Most on the left dismissed their concerns as the product of their ignorance of the realities of the economic system.

As it turns out, these working-class Trump supporters understand the current economic realities of the country much better than the mainstream media.   A new study from Harvard University researchers has found that the concerns of white working class are correct — they really are being left behind.

In fact, in the Harvard analysis of census and tax data covering 57 million children to look at people’s ability to rise into the middle and upper classes over two recent generations, the researchers found that working-class perceptions of feeling left behind are absolutely accurate. It is not just their imagination — these individuals are indeed being left behind. Black individuals who were born poor have gained ground while their white counterparts have lost ground.

This is not to suggest that Blacks are pulling ahead of all whites. The data demonstrate that Blacks still, on average, make less money than whites, and there is still an income gap.  But over one generation, the income gap between Blacks and whites has narrowed significantly.

Even the New York Times had to acknowledge that: “When the Black Gen X child turned 27 years old in 2005, their expected income, adjusted for inflation was low.  At the same age in 2019, the Black millennial fared significantly better.  For white children, it was the reverse.”

When the white Gen X child turned 27 in 2005, they could expect to make more than $34,560.  But when the white millennial turned 27 in 2019 they fared worse—making only $32,510.

What this important study shows is that social class trumps race today as class gaps grew for millennials and race gaps shrank similarly on issues like educational attainment, standardized test scores, and mortality rates.

Earnings increased for Black children at all parental income levels, reducing white-Black earnings gaps for children from low-income families by 30 percent. The Harvard researchers conclude that for white children in the United States born between 1978 and 1992, earnings increased for children from high-income families but decreased for children from low-income families, increasing earnings gaps by parental income (class) by 30 percent.

The Harvard study also attempted to help us understand these dramatic changes and pointed to what they called “differential changes in childhood environments, as proxied by parental employment rates within local communities defined by race, class, and childhood county.  Outcomes improved across birth cohorts for children who grow up in communities with increasing parental employment rates.

What that means is that children made greater progress in terms of social mobility when they live in communities with high employment of the parents in that community.  The lack of progress for white children is driven by changes in the communities in which children grew up, as measured by parental employment rates.  The Black-white mobility gap narrowed primarily because of changes in children’s chances of moving out of poverty rather than their chances of reaching the upper class.

Unfortunately, the Harvard researchers found the same patterns of growing white class gaps and shrinking Black-white race gaps for other outcomes such as incarceration and mortality rates as well as standardized test scores and graduation rates, showing that the difference in outcomes begins well before adult income can be measured.  Whites are losing ground at earlier ages.

Employment Key to Class Mobility

The most important conclusion drawn by the Harvard researchers points to the importance of social interaction for children living in communities in which people have jobs.  When children — white or Black — live in communities with high levels of unemployment and poverty, they are interacting with others of similar social status and an emerging culture of poverty.

While Black-white income gaps shrunk and white class gaps expanded throughout the United States, upward mobility for low-income white children living on either coast and in the Southwest fell markedly to rates on par with those observed in Appalachia and other areas that historically offered the lowest chances of upward mobility.

Conversely, for Black children, upward mobility increased the most in the Southeast and the Midwest — areas where outcomes had historically been poorest for Black Americans.

There is much to celebrate about Black upward mobility.  There is hope that this mobility will continue to increase.  Still, there are concerns about those whites who believe that new immigrants and other minority groups are pulling ahead of them. The Harvard study shows clearly that their perceptions may be correct.

READ MORE from Anne Hendershott:

When Grandparents Are Called to Parent

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The Right Way to Battle Child Poverty

The post Working-Class Whites Anxiously Losing Ground appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.