In The Long Shadow, a new book published by the Russell Sage Foundation, sociologists Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olsen present new and sobering findings on the life opportunities of low-income children in west Baltimore. For 25 years, the authors tracked the life progress of a group of almost 800 predominantly low-income Baltimore school children through the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP). The study monitored the children’s transitions to young adulthood with special attention to how opportunities available to them as early as first grade shaped their socioeconomic status as adults.

Several new articles on inequality in the U.S. cite Alexander, Entwisle, and Olsen’s original research. At Colorlines, Kai Wright’s comprehensive overview of unemployment and African American men uses the authors’ Baltimore study to explore the shortcomings of education as the sole path out of poverty. As The Long Shadow finds, education primarily enhanced the privileges of those who were already middle-class, rather than boosting up poor children. While many low-income youth profiled in the Baltimore study pursued higher education, only 4% had earned a bachelor’s degree by age 28, due to barriers such as the cost of college and family obligations. As Wright notes, The Long Shadow further shows that black men in the study were penalized more for “problem behaviors”—including dropping out of school and getting arrested—than their white counterparts. In other words, race and class interact closely to limit poor Baltimoreans’ life opportunities.

This feature is part of an ongoing RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which highlights some of the ongoing research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.

Visiting Scholar Caitlin Zaloom (New York University) is completing a book on the intimate financial lives of American families. Her research explores how debt, credit, and investment shape Americans’ pursuit of security, prosperity, and stability. She also examines how families discuss the risks and trade-offs involved in using financial tools to pursue better education, housing, and retirement.

In an interview with the Foundation, Zaloom discussed in particular the rise of household budgets, how they relate to the creation of an American middle class, and why the silence around personal finances can have troubling consequences for American families.

Q. As the U.S. struggles to recover from the Great Recession, economics has played a central role in public discourse. Low wages and income inequality continue to generate fierce debate, and the recent excitement around Thomas Piketty’s Capital seems to suggest that the massive wealth gap in the country will remain a topic of concern for a long time. Yet, in your research, you’ve found that individual household economics still tend to remain extremely private. What accounts for this silence around personal finances and why is it such a problem?

A new working paper by noted behavioral economics scholar Cass Sunstein, titled “Choosing Not to Choose,” is available for download from the Russell Sage Foundation. The abstract states:

Choice can be an extraordinary benefit or an immense burden. In some contexts, people choose not to choose, or would do so if they were asked. For example, many people prefer not to make choices about their health or retirement plans; they want to delegate those choices to a private or public institution that they trust (and may well be willing to pay a considerable amount for such delegations). This point suggests that however well-accepted, the line between active choosing and paternalism is often illusory. When private or public institutions override people’s desire not to choose, and insist on active choosing, they may well be behaving paternalistically, through a form of choice-requiring paternalism. Active choosing can be seen as a form of libertarian paternalism, and a frequently attractive one, if people are permitted to opt out of choosing in favor of a default (and in that sense not to choose); it is a form of nonlibertarian paternalism insofar as people are required to choose. For both ordinary people and private or public institutions, the ultimate judgment in favor of active choosing, or in favor of choosing not to choose, depends largely on the costs of decisions and the costs of errors.