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The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall: The Decline of the White Working Class
Demographics of Wealth, 2018 Series, Essay No. 3
Executive Summary
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- Neither race nor education is sufficient alone to explain the decline of the white working class. White college graduate families are doing very well, suggesting that factors related to identifying as white are not sufficient to explain the decline. Education and class also don’t provide a full explanation: Hispanic and black working class families made some progress on many measures, while the white working class regressed.
A more plausible explanation for the decline of the white working class is their diminishing set of advantages relative to nonwhite working class families in terms of high school graduation rates, access to relatively high-paying jobs, and freedom from explicit workplace discrimination.
The White Working Class: National Trends, Then and Now
September 24, 2019
By William R. Emmons , Ana Hernández Kent , Lowell Ricketts
The demographic makeup of the country is rapidly changing. In The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall: The Decline of the White Working Class, we documented decreases in the shares of income, wealth and population of whites without a four-year college degree (hereafter, white working class). Their absolute numbers are shrinking as well.
Today, we’re kicking off a series extending that work. The first post in this three-part series will examine the national and regional trend. In the next blog post, we’ll explore the changing demographics at the state and county level. In the final post, we’ll dive deeper into potential causes of the decline and economic consequences...