Intergenerational Wealth Mobility and Racial Inequality

March 25, 2019
Intergenerational Wealth Mobility and Racial Inequality

Intergenerational Wealth Mobility and Racial Inequality by Alexandra Killewald and Fabian T. Pfeffer was recently published by Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World (March 21, 2019).

The black-white gap in household wealth is large and well documented. Here, we visualize how this racial wealth gap persists across generations. Animating the flow of individuals between the relative wealth position of parents and their adult children, we show that the disadvantage of black families is a consequence both of wealth inequality in prior generations and race differences in the transmission of wealth positions across generations: Black children both have less wealthy parents on average and are far more likely to be downwardly mobile in household wealth. By displaying intergenerational movements between parental and offspring wealth quintiles, we underline how intergenerational fluctuation coexists with the maintenance of a severely racialized wealth structure.

Included below are two animations featured in the article that visualize their findings:

Animation 1 focuses on racial differences in mobility rates but obscures the fact that black and white children also are unequally distributed across parental wealth origins: White children are far more likely to have wealthy parents. Therefore, Animation 2 rescales the number of dots representing black and white children to match their distribution across parental wealth quintiles.