Raj Chetty and his team at Opportunity Insights have crunched the numbers on 20 million Americans born around 1980, to look closely at intergenerational patterns of poverty and mobility. They find that Black men are much less likely than white men to rise up the income ladder, while Black and white women raised by poor parents have similar rates of upward intergenerational mobility. Chetty and his team conclude that the overall Black–white intergenerational mobility gap “is entirely driven by differences in men’s, not women’s, outcomes.”13
