Poor Black Kids Are Doing Better. Poor White Kids Are Doing Worse.

The yawning gap between the mobility of white children and Black children growing up in low-income families has narrowed sharply, according to a major new study released today, based on tens of millions of anonymized census and tax records. Yet the findings are not entirely comforting. Inequality narrowed not just because poor Black kids have grown up to earn more as adults but also because poor white kids are earning less.

Children born in lower-income white families did not fall behind just relative to the gains made by their higher-income white...