The Rise of the Black Middle Class in the United States

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

A number of people have made really quite bold claims about progress among African Americans. They've used data from the current population survey to make the claim that the high school dropout rate among young black men has declined. But my research shows that if you include inmates who are disproportionately high school dropouts, there's been no decline in the racial gap in the highSchool dropout rate. Among young black men who've dropped out of high school they're more likely to be in prison or jail than they are to be employed now. The voter turnout rate among those most disadvantaged young black men was the same as it was Voter turnout and by this I mean the fraction of the population that voted not of

Becky Pettit of the University of Washington and author of Invisible Men talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the growth of the prison population in the United States in recent decades. Pettit describes the magnitude of the increase particularly among demographic groups. She then discusses the implications of this increase for interpreting social statistics. Because the prison population isn't included in the main government surveys used by social scientists, data drawn from those surveys can be misleading as to what is actually happening among demographic groups, particularly the African-American population.