The fact that US earnings growth is so poor is generally appreciated. What may be less recognized is the disparity of earnings according to race and gender. To be sure the discrepancy does not prove discriminatory business practices. Occupation, education and skill levels are likely significant explanatory variables.
[Listen: Doug Short: Consumer Income Has Not Kept Up With Inflation]
This first Great Graphic was posted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Median earnings for men consistently are greater than the median earnings for women across regardless of race or ethnicity.
What some will find most surprising is that the median income of Asians is the highest. The median income is nearly 75% high than for Hispanics. The median income for Asian women is nearly the same as the median income of white men.
The second chart here comes from the Washington Post's Wonk Blog. Brad Plumer posted this graph which traces the ratio of black to white unemployment over the last half decade, which was provided by the Economic Policy Institute.
Black unemployment is consistently twice as high as white unemployment. Although there has been some variance, the ratio in last year (2.1) was essentially unchanged from 1963 (2.2), prior to the civil rights legislation and the march Martin Luther King Jr led in Washington then for Jobs and Freedom.
In fact the progress made from 1970-1990 has been largely unwound over the past two decades. Work by the Economic Policy Institute also found that the desegregation of public schools has stopped since 1980. Separate is fundamentally unequal and the more non-white students in a school, the fewer the resources. A 10% increase in the number of non-white students is associated with $75 decline in school spending per student.
Source: Marc to Market
