Mapping Income Mobility: The Best (And Worst) Places To Grow Up

A new study from Harvard economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren seeks to quantify the financial impact of where America's children are brought up. More specifically, Chetty and Hendren measure "the percentage earnings gain from growing up in each county [in America] relative to an average place for children in low-income families." 

The goal of the study (and its predecessors) is to determine the most effective way to imporove economic outcomes for low-income children. Here, the researchers "focus on families who moved across areas to study how neighborhoods affect upward mobility." Unsurprisingly, Chetty and Hendren "find that every year of exposure to a better environment improves a child’s chances of success." Interestingly, the economists have actually quantified the improvement in order to "estimates of the causal effect of each county in America on upward mobility."

The map below, from NY Times, shows "how much extra money a county causes children in poor families to make" compared to national averages for low-income households:

Click here for interactive map

More from NY Times:

Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren [have had] huge consequences on how we think about poverty and mobility in the United States. The pair, economists at Harvard, have long been known for their work on income mobility, but the latest findings go further. Now, the researchers are no longer confined to talking about which counties merely correlate well with income mobility; new data suggests some places actually cause it.

Across the country, the researchers found five factors associated with strong upward mobility: less segregation by income and race, lower levels of income inequality, better schools, lower rates of violent crime, and a larger share of two-parent households. In general, the effects of place are sharper for boys than for girls, and for lower-income children than for rich.

“The broader lesson of our analysis,” Mr. Chetty and Mr. Hendren write, “is that social mobility should be tackled at a local level.”

We'll leave you with the following screenshots from the interactive map (presented with no comment):

Comments

[d edwards]

Baltimore..run by black democrat/socialist/racists should be nirvana for black "folks", so why isn't it?

[DutchBoy2015]

EVerything boils down to getting a skill, or good education,  networking and knowing the right people and not being afraid to take risks.  

Good fortune counts a lot (good karma).  BEing in the right place at the right time which you CANNOT figure out with your brain.

Lots of highly educated people are on skid row.

Oddly enough I tripled my income the day I left the USA due to finding a little known job overseas thru someone else.  I didn't start living the good life until I left the USA and as anothe person here quipped. most people tend to move back to close where they were born,  In my case my birthplace is 20 miles away, and I have worked all over the world. 

[blackgoldcapital]

Rich gets richer, the deep south get poorer. 

[Paulson Bazooka]

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