Lawrence Cain Jr., a Black millennial in Cincinnati, did not have a comfortable upbringing. His family didn’t have much money. They took few vacations. But Mr. Cain did have a strong community — which he said taught him entrepreneurship and showed him he could dream big. His mom took double shifts at nursing homes. She and her father ran their own businesses. Mr. Cain worked at his grandfather’s deli starting at 11 years old.
Mr. Cain, 35, got a two-year degree in business management and first worked as a bank teller and financial adviser. In 2015, he was ready to forge his own path. He started a financial coaching business, Abundance University. Business is booming. Today, Mr. Cain identifies as solidly middle-class. He and his wife, a teacher, can support themselves, their three children and then some. They take holidays around the country. “My kids are spoiled,” he joked.
Mr. Cain in many ways reflects the trends captured by a new Harvard study. It looked at two groups: a Gen X cohort born in 1978 and a millennial cohort born in 1992. The researchers combed through decades of anonymized census and tax records to which the federal government gave them access. The data covered 57 million children, which offered the researchers a more detailed view into recent generations than previous economic studies had. Adjusting for inflation, they then measured these groups’ ability to rise to the middle and upper classes — their economic mobility.
Lawrence Cain Jr. of Cincinnati did not have an easy upbringing, but today identifies as middle-class.
Asa Featherstone, IV for The New York Times
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The researchers found that Black millennials born to low-income parents had an easier time rising than the previous Black generation did. At the same time, white millennials born to poor parents had a harder time than their white Gen X counterparts. Black people still, on average, make less money than white people, and the overall income gap remains large. But it has narrowed for Black and white Americans born poor — by about 30 percent.
The community you come from has a huge effect on your economic mobility. For centuries, this meant a tremendous advantage for white Americans, even those born into low-income families. But in a surprising shift, the study suggests that advantage is not as large as it once was.
On the flip side of Mr. Cain is someone like Derek Brown, a white millennial in Cincinnati. His parents were separated, and he was raised in two worlds, one middle class and one poor. His dad worked at a General Electric factory, a steady job that provided a more middle-class life. His mom worked long hours at gas stations, Mr. Brown said, but she struggled. Sometimes, she couldn’t pay the bills, and their power was cut off at home. “It was never the dream,” he said.
Unlike Mr. Cain, Mr. Brown did not have a strong sense of community, as he bounced between his mother, his father and his grandparents. Watching his mother, he came to believe that hard work does not necessarily lead to a better life. He once hoped to become a journalist when he grew up, but he gave up that dream to pursue what he believed would be a more realistic way to pay the bills.
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The Northside neighborhood in Cincinnati has crime rates that are higher than the national average.
Asa Featherstone, IV for The New York Times
About five miles south of Northside, the Over-the-Rhine district is known for its dining and culture.
Asa Featherstone, IV for The New York Times
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Today, Mr. Brown, 34, feels that he is behind where his father was. He works as a hairstylist at Great Clips. He lives paycheck to paycheck. He currently has a $3,000 medical bill that his insurance didn’t cover, and he doesn’t know how he’ll pay for it. He’s always scared of the next big cost. “I have really bad financial anxiety,” he said. “I don’t even want to drive to places. What if my car breaks down?”
“It’s instilled in your head: Anything is possible if you work hard for it,” Mr. Brown added. “What no one tells you is that for some people there is a glass ceiling, and you just don’t see it until you hit it.”
As the Harvard study shows, the difference in outcomes between Mr. Cain and Mr. Brown is increasingly typical. But the racial differences weren’t the only findings. Over the decade and a half of the study, the opportunity gap between white people born rich and those born poor expanded by roughly 30 percent. One possible interpretation: “Class is becoming more important in America,” while race is becoming less so, Raj Chetty, the study’s lead author, told me.
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Let’s look at how class has dictated outcomes. For white Americans in particular, changes in mobility significantly differed between those born poor and those born rich.
Imagine four white children: a rich one and a poor one born in 1978, and the same pair born in 1992.
At 27 years old, the poor white millennial would make less money on average than the poor white Gen X-er.
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The white Gen X child born rich, unsurprisingly, could expect to make much more.
And while poor white millennials do worse than their predecessors, rich white millennials do better.
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The change has widened class divides in the United States.
The data didn’t just show that people’s lives were guided by immutable facts like class and race. It suggested that a person’s community — the availability of work, schooling, social networks and so on — plays a central role.
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Imagine a thriving American community. What makes it successful? Jobs are an important factor. So are effective schools, nice parks, low crime rates and a general sense that success is achievable. In a thriving place, people not only get good jobs, but they also know that those jobs can lead to better lives, because they see and feel it all the time. “Our fates are intertwined,” said Stefanie A. DeLuca, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who was not part of the Harvard study. “The fortunes of those around you in your community also impact what happens to you.”
On an individual level, Lawrence Cain Jr. benefited from both his mother’s jobs and his family’s support and entrepreneurship. They helped plant the idea that he could work hard and become a business owner. “If your networks are doing well, you may think that you can do well, too,” said David B. Grusky, a sociologist at Stanford who was also not part of the Harvard study.
The inverse is also true. Derek Brown said that his childhood was too chaotic for him to develop strong social roots. Across a community, bad events can cascade and cause things to fall apart. Consider a neighborhood in which crime rises. Businesses move to safer locations. The tax base shrinks, and infrastructure deteriorates along with schools. People flee, and social networks splinter. A sense of despair takes over among the people who remain.
Real-world effects
A cookout in the Northside neighborhood.
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Asa Featherstone, IV for The New York Times
Why did things get worse for poor white people and their communities, but not for their Black counterparts? One explanation focuses on the availability of jobs. The researchers found that community employment levels are an important predictor of differences in economic mobility.
In the real world, the situation might have played out like this: Over the past few decades, globalization and changes in technology have caused many jobs to go from the United States to China, India and elsewhere. These shifts appear to have pushed white people out of the work force, while Black people found other jobs.
There are several explanations for the racial disparity. White workers might have had more wealth or savings to weather unemployment than their Black counterparts did, but at a cost to their upward mobility. They might also have been less willing to find another job. A steel mill that shut down could have employed not just one worker but his father and grandfather, making it a family occupation. People in that situation might feel that they lost something more than a job — and might not settle for any other work.
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The places where Black workers live were generally less affected by job flight than the places where white workers live. And compared with earlier generations, Black workers today are less likely to face racial prejudice in the labor force, making it easier for them to find work. While a white worker might have a generational connection to a steel mill job, a Black worker often does not, because segregation kept his parents and grandparents out.
These trends add up to decades of lost economic progress for low-income white people and the opposite for Black Americans.
Change in persistence of poverty
Share of children born low-income who are no longer low-income at age 27
Source: Opportunity Insights
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The findings do not show that Black opportunity took away from white opportunity. In fact, the study found that white mobility had deteriorated least in the places where Black mobility had improved most.
In some ways, the research might prove politically controversial. Conservatives have long argued that white working-class Americans fell behind, while liberals have emphasized helping minority groups through policies like affirmative action. The left points out that Black and brown people remain far behind their white counterparts and therefore need more help from social programs. The right believes that’s outdated thinking, if it was ever correct. The study provides fodder for both sides.
“The left and the right have very different views on race and class,” said Ralph Richard Banks, a law professor at Stanford who wasn’t involved in the research. “The value of the study is that it brings some unimpeachable evidence to bear on these questions.” He added, “There’s something in it for everyone.”
For their part, the Harvard researchers feel optimistic about one major finding: Economic mobility can change relatively quickly. It improved in Charlotte, N.C., since 2014, after an earlier study by the Harvard group drove the city to make new investments. Local leaders got nonprofits and businesses, including Bank of America, which is based there, to provide job training, education, housing and other services to poorer residents. The researchers hope the results persuade other policymakers around the country to make similar investments.
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“It actually is possible for opportunity to change in a serious way, even in a relatively short time frame,” said Benjamin Goldman, one of the Harvard researchers.
These trends don’t apply evenly to every part of the country. Some places had bigger or smaller gains for Black Americans and bigger or smaller losses for white Americans, as this map shows:
Expected income at age 27 for children born poor, by county
Source: Opportunity Insights
Note: Maps show expected incomes at age 27 in counties with at least 250 children in each relevant group. Counties shown in gray do not have estimates due to insufficient data.
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Mr. Cain believes his story shows that hard work can make a better life possible. He saw just how much his mother, as a Black woman, needed to do to get by. He faced his own doubts and troubles, including racism and discrimination, growing up. But he always remembered what his mother and grandfather taught him — that he could achieve his version of the American dream.
“I can chase that feeling every day of doing things for me, doing things with people I love and making an impact on the community,” Mr. Cain said. “That’s success for me.”
How common are stories like Mr. Cain’s where you live? You can see how economic mobility has changed in your county through this interactive:
Comparing incomes for Black and white children born poor, by county
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Israel said on Saturday that it was expanding a new ground offensive in Gaza, with troops closing in on the enclave after days of air strikes that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.
Defence minister Israel Katz said the renewed fighting was forcing Hamas to soften its stance in talks being held in Qatar to secure the release of the remaining hostages being held in captivity in Gaza — part of an Israeli strategy of “negotiations under fire”.
A Hamas official told Reuters that a new round of talks was under way on Saturday.
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Palestinians fear the new offensive is the precursor to a plan approved on May 5 by Israel’s security cabinet, under which most of the besieged enclave would be occupied by the Israeli military and 2.1mn Palestinians would be forced into a small area by the border with Egypt.
“The Palestinian cause is navigating one of its gravest and most perilous junctures,” Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi told an Arab League summit. Israel is engaged in a “deliberate endeavour to forcibly displace [Gaza’s] inhabitants under untold horrors of war”, he said.
Egypt fears an exodus of Palestinians into its territory. NBC News reported that the US is negotiating with Libya to take in as many as 1mn Palestinian refugees.
At least 250 Palestinians have been killed in the last two days, health officials in Gaza said, with hundreds more wounded.
Israel has blocked any food, medicine or fresh water from entering Gaza for the last two and half months, pushing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into starvation, a UN panel said earlier this week.
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The full extent of the offensive was unclear on Saturday. Residents reported machine gun fire in parts of Gaza and Israeli media said tanks had been massed on the border. Israeli warplanes dropped flyers over some parts of Gaza with a reference to the biblical story about Moses parting the sea.
“The Israeli army is coming,” the flyer, shared widely on social media, said.
Israel stepped up the intensity of its air strikes earlier this week as US President Donald Trump wrapped up his Gulf tour.
Israeli officials had earlier referred to his trip as a “window of opportunity” to broker a swap of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners that would be acceptable to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies.
In the event, Trump only negotiated the release of a single Israeli soldier, who is also an American national.
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An estimated 20 hostages and the bodies of as many as 38 more are still being held by Hamas, which has refused to release them without a complete ceasefire and the full withdrawal of Israeli forces.
Katz said Hamas’s return to negotiations was evidence that neither a ceasefire nor the resumption of humanitarian assistance to Gaza was necessary for negotiations to succeed.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that Israel’s siege was “beyond description, beyond atrocious and beyond inhumane”.
“A policy of siege & starvation makes a mockery of international law,” he said on X.
His remarks came days after UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher warned of a looming “genocide” in Gaza — the first time a senior UN official has publicly used such language.
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Israel rejects Fletcher’s characterisation. It says it has blocked the aid to prevent it from being stolen by Hamas.
More than 53,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began, most of them women and children, according to local health officials.
At least 1,200 people were killed in Israel in Hamas’s cross-border attack on October 7 2023 and 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli officials.
Storm damage is surveyed in Laurel County, Ky., after tornadoes brought destruction to the region Friday night.
Laurel County, Ky. Fiscal Court/Facebook/Screenshot by NPR
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Laurel County, Ky. Fiscal Court/Facebook/Screenshot by NPR
Powerful storms and tornadoes tore through several Midwestern and Southern states overnight Friday, leaving carnage and flattened buildings in their wake.
In Kentucky at least 24 people have died. Authorities say 23 of those deaths occurred in London, Ky., in the southeastern part of the state, with some people still unaccounted for.
A message shortly after 8 a.m. ET from Gov. Andy Beshear called for prayers for the affected families. But less than an hour later, the number of known deaths had already risen by 10.
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Kentucky, we’re starting today with the tough news that we lost at least 14 of our people to last night’s storms, but sadly, this number is expected to grow as we receive more information. Please pray for all of our affected families.
— Governor Andy Beshear (@GovAndyBeshear) May 17, 2025
In Missouri, there are at least seven dead — five in the St. Louis area and two others in a more rural part of the state, south of the capital.
Responders there are still searching homes and buildings for survivors, and officials are asking people to stay out of the impacted areas to allow crews to do their work.
According to PowerOutage.us, the storms left nearly a half million customers without power in dozens of states from Missouri to Maryland.
In parallel to a brutal war along a 1,000km front, Russia and Ukraine are locked in a titanic diplomatic battle to persuade Donald Trump that the other is the real impediment to peace.
So Vladimir Putin took a big risk over the last week, slow rolling US negotiators over a peace proposal, according to officials familiar with the discussions, then refusing to turn up for talks with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Turkey that he himself had publicly initiated.
So far, the Russian leader’s refusal to engage on terms set by others has been met with little resistance — and certainly not enough to compel concessions or alter the course of his war.
The clearest sign of that came when US President Donald Trump seemed to excuse the Russian leader’s no-show on Thursday and simultaneously questioned the whole point of the Russia-Ukraine talks, saying: “Nothing’s gonna happen until Putin and I get together.”
It was a gift to Putin, who has long sought a one-on-one meeting with a president determined to normalise US-Russian relations. For the Ukrainians, it revived their worst fears — that Trump will seek to cut a deal with Putin over their heads and sell Ukraine down the river.
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“Putin is doing just enough to convince Trump that he is engaged in this effort to find peace in Ukraine, while also doing as much as possible to make sure it goes nowhere,” said a senior European diplomat involved in the negotiations between western capitals. “And Trump is falling for it.”
That suspicion is shared by some of America’s closest allies. Putin, German defence minister Boris Pistorius said this week, was “trying to lead the American president down the garden path” by refusing to come to Istanbul. “I’m pretty sure that the American president can’t be happy about that,” he told reporters in Berlin.
Putin’s reluctance to take part in substantive peace negotiations has become clearer in recent days, even to those in the Trump administration who had been inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
On Thursday last week, senior Russian officials told Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, that Putin did not want to discuss the 22-point peace plan that Witkoff had drawn up with Ukrainian and European input, three people briefed on the discussions told the FT.
Those 22 points were discussed at length the following day on a call between Ukrainian and US officials, according to people familiar with the matter. Ukraine was represented on the call by Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, and Ukrainian defence minister Rustem Umerov; the US by Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also currently serving as national security adviser, and Gen Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Kyiv.
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Russia’s response resulted in Witkoff, who has met Putin for talks four times since February, postponing provisional plans to meet the Russian leader this week, the people said. A person close to Witkoff said no trip had been planned.
In the days that followed, the pace of diplomatic activity picked up. European and Ukrainian leaders met to call for an unconditional, 30-day ceasefire in the war, warning Putin of tough new sanctions if he failed to comply — a demand supported by the US.
Putin rejected the demand but came back with his own counterproposal — direct Russia-Ukraine talks, to be held on Thursday in Istanbul. Trump welcomed the idea and urged Zelenskyy to take part. The Ukrainian leader acceded to his request and challenged Putin to come to Turkey himself for what would have been only the second in-person meeting between them.
But the Russian leader refused and sent a low-level delegation instead, led by his former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky.
The meeting, held on Friday, wrapped up after less than two hours, without a breakthrough. The two sides agreed to swap thousands of prisoners-of-war, but made no progress on a lasting ceasefire.
European leaders expressed their frustration. “The past few hours have shown that Russia has no interest in a ceasefire and that, unless there is increased pressure from the Europeans and Americans to achieve this outcome, it will not happen spontaneously,” said French President Emmanuel Macron said, referring to new sanctions.
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“People in Ukraine and across the world have paid the price for Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and across Europe, now he must pay the price for avoiding peace,” said UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer.
Starmer, Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk ended up issuing a joint statement saying Putin’s position was “unacceptable”.
The four leaders, together with Zelenskyy, also held a joint phone call with Trump. Starmer said there was now “a high level of co-ordination” between a core of four countries — the UK, France, Germany and Poland — “and the US administration of President Trump” on Ukraine.
“It is just drip, drip, drip,” said one European foreign minister, referring to Europe’s messaging to the Trump administration in the hope the president eventually shifts position on Russia.
But so far that European rhetoric has not been matched by anyone in the Trump administration, which has continued to express frustration with both sides in the conflict, without singling out Russia, and hint that it could walk away.
Rubio said on Thursday that Trump was “willing to stick with this as long as it takes to achieve peace”. “What we cannot do, however, is continue to fly all over the world and engage in meetings that are not going to be productive,” he said.
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A senior Ukrainian official described the situation as Putin and Zelenskyy being locked in a geopolitical game of “blackjack” — with Trump as the dealer.
Putin held a “strong but risky” hand, the official said. Ukraine is betting that if he draws one more card, the Russian president could go “bust”.
