Intergenerational Wealth Mobility and Racial Inequality

Killewald and Pfeffer provide data visualizations to demonstrate how the racial wealth gap persists across generations. Animating the flow of individuals between the relative wealth position of parents and their adult children, the data shows 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, the data underlines how intergenerational fluctuation coexists with the maintenance of a severely racialized wealth structure.