The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again

by Robert D. Putnam

In fact, progress toward income equality between blacks and whites—as we have now seen in many other measures—flatlined or outright regressed after the late 1970s, as Figure 6.4, as well as much other data, suggests.42 As Robert A. Margo writes, the black-to-white income ratio improved on average 7.7 percentage points per decade between 1940 and 1970. This was by no means a rapid enough convergence, but had this rate of change continued, the income ratio “would have been 0.88 in 2010, instead of its actual value of 0.64.”43 The critical result of widening, rather than further narrowing, of the national income gap during America’s “I” decades is that the difference between median black and white earnings today is “as large as it was in 1950.”