MIT economist David Autor has produced a new study showing that Blacks and Hispanics are particularly affected by the decline in middle-class urban jobs in recent decades. Image: MIT News
MIT economist David Autor has produced a new study showing that Blacks and Hispanics are particularly affected by the decline in middle-class urban jobs in recent decades. Image: MIT News - Study shows that cities have stopped providing middle-class work in recent decades - especially for Black and Latino workers. The great U.S. economic boom after World War II was an urban phenomenon. Tens of millions of Americans flocked to cities to work and forge a future in the nation's middle class. And for a few decades, living in the big city paid off. By 1980, four-year college graduates in the most urban quartile of job markets had incomes 40 percent greater, per household, than college graduates in the least urban quartile. And workers without four-year college degrees ("non-college" workers) in the same urban areas had hourly wages 35 percent higher than their rural counterparts.
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