On June 4, the Kenan Institute will convene leaders from business, academia, and public and civic life for its annual Conference on Market-Based Solutions for Reducing Wealth Inequality, where we will examine private sector capacities to build shared prosperity. Supporting the Kenan Institute’s mission of developing and promoting market-based solutions to vital economic issues, conference participants will discuss and develop a better understanding of how businesses can help grow the nation’s wealth from the bottom up.

Inequality provides a useful conceptual framework for understanding some of the nation’s major social and economic challenges, but as we look to businesses to promote wealth creation among those with less, we are not focused on taking anything away from those with more. In fact, we believe that by increasing upward mobility for low-income and underserved Americans, the private sector would not only do good but would also share in the benefits along with every part of the country’s wealth distribution.

Inequality’s Many Faces and Definitions

Inequality is a complex issue, with as many definitions as practitioners aiming to define it. Paige Ouimet, Kenan Institute executive director and UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School professor of finance, has spent much of her career researching income inequality, and she published an informative Insight in December 2024 discussing inequality’s many definitions and economic ills. As she points out: If we are to address its outcomes we must first be clear about what we mean by “inequality.” Commonly defined as unequal levels of wealth or income, inequality is such a multifaceted and contentious topic, we find it practical to look at its main constituents and attend to its root causes rather than its myriad effects.

This conference will address wealth inequality from a vantage point of what the private sector can do to mitigate inequality’s economic ills and broaden access to vital resources. The emphasis on access (and the lack thereof) provides a constructive framing of inequality’s principal factor and upward mobility’s primary roadblock. Examining access in the US, we can readily see the spotty availability of essential resources, which are often distributed according to geographic and historical inequities. These imbalances mean that the ZIP code where you are born disproportionately determines your lifelong financial well-being and even your health outcomes.

Lack of access derives, in part, from exclusion: Many underserved individuals are not included in the decision-making and policymaking processes that affect their ability to build wealth. Promoting upward mobility means expanding access to representation in both public and private spheres. The main question, one that we will repeatedly return to, is how do private sector leaders include a greater share of Americans in their wealth-building activities?

To answer this key question, our conference will engage practitioners from civic organizations, research institutions, public offices and private firms in a joint effort to forge a roadmap for building individual and community wealth.

Current Challenges

By many measures, levels of wealth and income inequality in the US have grown over the past half-century. When we track incomes over time, we see that average incomes for the richest Americans have skyrocketed in recent decades, while earnings for the bottom 20% of the distribution have remained relatively flat, leading to the yawning income gap we observe today.

Alt-Text: Line graph showing growth of average income among wealthiest Americans has risen sharply in recent decades while other quintiles are relatively flat.

When we compare incomes between selected groups, the gaps are ever wider. Individuals in rural areas, on average, earn less than 85 cents for every dollar that their urban counterparts make. Meanwhile, the racial divide is stark, as Black and Latino Americans earn much less than white and Asian Americans.

Alt-Text: Bar graph showing Asian American and white workers with higher median weekly earnings in Q3 2025 than Black and Latino American workers.

Income is only one gauge of individual and household well-being, and other metrics of financial and socioeconomic health give a more comprehensive account of the nation’s unequal resource distribution along racial lines. As of July 2025, the unemployment rate among Black Americans was 7.2%, about double that of white Americans. Representing around 12% of the nation’s population, Black Americans account for more than 31% of those living in the US Census Bureau’s “persistent-poverty tracts.”

As these statistics indicate, wealth disparities between racial groups in the US are severe. By 2022, the average white American household held more than six times the wealth of the average Black or Hispanic American household; that multiple increases to 8x when comparing Asian American households with their Black and Hispanic counterparts. Unfortunately, wealth inequality is one area where the US has regressed in recent decades. Racial discrepancies in American household wealth have dramatically worsened over the past half-century.

Alt-Text: Line graph showing average white and Asian American households holding 6x and 8x more wealth, respectively, than Black and Hispanic households in 2022.

The gender pay gap reflects another persistent partition, as the average woman in America earns about 81 cents for every dollar her male counterpart takes in. This gender inequality overlays neatly on racial disparities, as Black and Hispanic women in the US earn and own less than white and Asian women.

Alt-Text: Bar graph showing men with higher average lifetime earnings than women across race/ethnicity for those born 1960-64.

Women in America, especially those in minority groups, saw their employment and income hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic, as women tend to bear the brunt of care-giving and other service sector work. These jobs, as well as the loads of unpaid labor women perform — work that is not captured in formal employment statistics — tend to be among the least compensated and most vulnerable to downturns, offering little economic security and scant opportunities for upward mobility.

Even when accounting for unequal levels of educational attainment between races and genders, income and wealth levels in the US are far lower for Black and Hispanic individuals and for women than they are for their white and male counterparts. These challenges point to widespread disparities in access to opportunities for upward mobility. To be clear, upward mobility measured simply as the ability to earn more than your parents has declined nationwide for generations. Ninety percent of children born in the US in 1940 went on to earn more than their parents. That figure dropped to 50% for those born in 1980. So, it is fair to say that today we face broad-based challenges to upward mobility and that these challenges disproportionately burden certain subsections of the country’s population. We aim to develop solutions to these problems, looking to the private sector to lead in building a durable and expansive prosperity for a larger share of Americans.  

Private Sector Approaches to Wealth Building

Last year’s conference opened our examination of the various actions that the private sector, along with government and nonprofit institutions, is taking to promote wealth creation among the country’s low-income and underserved communities. These multimodal engagements include reducing constraints on households, providing opportunities for justice-involved individuals, designing new policies that promote financial saving, building out employee ownership models, and forging public-private partnerships designed to bring financial and educational services to areas lacking these resources.

Building on last year’s groundwork, the 2026 conference will convene actors from every sector to bring new research and experience to bear on what private entities can do to promote upward mobility for the American individuals, households and communities in the bottom half of the income distribution. Expert speakers will present on various topics, with themes including the geography of wealth, access to credit and financial instruments, and inclusive infrastructure and financial systems. Continuing a thread from last year’s event, this year’s presenters will discuss how employers, financial institutions and local governments can work together to remove barriers and reduce constraints for individuals and households. These conversations will examine policies and programs that promote affordable childcare, flexible work schedules and other options.

Children born in areas with low access to educational and capital resources invariably grow up to be adults with limited educational attainment, income and wealth. This impediment to upward mobility harms not only the individuals who happen to live in the wrong neighborhood but also the businesses that miss out on potential talent, clients and customers. Limiting the wealth-building capacity of underserved Americans does untold damage to the nation’s social and economic health.

Founded in the belief that wealth, income and access are positive sum features of American society, our 2026 Conference on Market-Based Solutions for Reducing Wealth Inequality will examine and shape business-based solutions to these challenges, as substantial gains in upward mobility cannot be achieved without a fully engaged private sector. These aims constitute not only a moral imperative but an opportunity for businesses: It’s in their interest to help communities thrive because private sector success is founded in a prosperous public.

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• Keyword(s):
• inclusive development 28