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Obama, Katrina, and the Persistence of Racial Inequality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2016

Robert A. Margo
Robert A. Margo*
Affiliation:
Robert A. Margo is Professor of Economics, Boston University, 270 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215 and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

New benchmark estimates of Black-White income ratios for 1870, 1900, and 1940 are combined with standard post-World War census data. The resulting time series reveals that the pace of racial income convergence has generally been steady but slow, quickening only during the 1940s and the modern Civil Rights era. I explore the interpretation of the time series with a model of intergenerational transmission of inequality in which racial differences in causal factors that determine income are very large just after the Civil War and which erode slowly across subsequent generations.

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”

—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 301 - 341
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2016 

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Footnotes

This is my presidential address to the Economic History Association. I am grateful to Martha Bailey, Richard Baker, Pat Bayer, Leah Boustan, Ann Carlos, William Collins, Peter Doeringer, Randy Ellis, Stanley Engerman, Claudia Goldin, Kevin Lang, Paul Rhode, Gary Solon, Marianne Wanamaker, and seminar participants at Boston University, Middlebury College, and the University of California at Los Angeles for helpful comments, and to Ying Liu for outstanding research assistance.

References

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