By Steve Sailer
02/10/2023
Earlier (2018): Raj Chetty on Why the Low Income of Black Males Proves IQ Doesn’t Matter
Here’s a graph I made of Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s database of 21 million Americans born 1978-1983. Along the horizontal axis is the percentile of their parents’ income in 1994-2000 relative to everybody else’s 1040 forms. This is measured against all Americans rather than just for their own race. For example, the top 1% includes about 1800 blacks and over 180,000 whites. But both are pretty huge sample sizes.
The black line is the percent of black males born around 1980 who were incarcerated on April 1, 2010 (Census Day 2010). The blue line is the percent of white males incarcerated. Both are measured against the left vertical axis.
The red line, measured against the right vertical axis, is the ratio of percent of blacks incarcerated to percent of whites incarcerated. It rises from about 3 to 1 for the poorest Americans to about 7 to 1 among the richest, before exploding to 10 to 1 for the richest one percent. Presumably, black males born before to the Talented Tenth tend to be the sons of doctors, lawyers, and accountants, while black males born to the Wonderful One-Hundredth tend to be the sons of athletes and rappers and thus more of a handful.
Unfortunately, Chetty doesn’t report incarceration rates for Hispanics or Asians.
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