Thirty years ago, Gary Becker in his now classic work, Economics of Discrimination, sparked renewed interest in an economic analysis of racial income disparities. The volumes of research papers that built on Becker's contribution over the last three decades added a great deal to what we know about the reasons for the wide income differences between the races. One reason was the emergence of several large scale micro data sets of which the 1960 census was the first. Today, analysis is based not only on the 1980 census file but also on several longitudinal data sets best represented by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Parnes National Longitudinal Surveys. Ironically, it is the release of micro data files from two pre-Becker data sets that appears to offer the greatest potential for answering the important questions that remain. In this paper, we use these two data sets-the 1940 and 1950 census files-in combination with the three subsequent census files to describe long-run trends in black poverty. We begin by describing purely labor market developments, but supplement that depiction with a broader look at events that impacted on the black family. The paper concludes with an examination of the downside of black economic progress-the increasing disengagement of many black men from the labor market.

We use the Current Population Survey to describe what we believe are the most salient aspects of labor force behavior of older men and women during the last 2 decades. First, we show that early retirement has increased dramatically, and this trend continued through the 1980s. Second, we show that the factors that most sharply distinguish propensities toward early retirement are those usually associated with low wages. Third, we show that trends in reduced participation for older men parallel those for younger men, while a pattern of increasing female participation is to be expected given the behavior of younger cohorts.

The "human capital earnings function," in which earnings are expressed as a quadratic in potential experience, is probably the most widely accepted empirical specification in economics. In spite of its widespread acceptance, the human capital earnings function provides a very poor approximation of the true empirical relationship between earnings and experience. The standard formulation understates early career earnings growth by about 30%-50% and overstates midcareer growth by 20%-50%. However, simple alternative specifications that fit the data are available.