Tremendous Variation Seen Across U.S. In The Extent To Which Kids Can Rise Out Of Poverty

(MoJo) Kevin Drum reports ~ Map of the Day: Where the Poverty Trap is Worst

David Leonhardt of the New York Times presents this map today, based on a new paper about intergenerational mobility. Basically, the authors find that in some regions, poor kids have a decent chance of growing up and moving out of poverty. In other regions, poor kids pretty much stay poor forever.
There are several regions that are above and below average, but the obvious outlier is the deep South......... Poor kids don't exactly have a great chance in life no matter where they live, but in the South, they have almost no chance at all. If you take a look at the policy preferences of Southern governors and legislatures, that's apparently exactly the way they like it.

My headline quote is from Leonardt's must-read NYT article ~ In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters

These comparisons provide some of the most powerful evidence so far about the factors that seem to drive people’s chances of rising beyond the station of their birth, including education, family structure and the economic layout of metropolitan areas.

Climbing the income ladder occurs less often in the Southeast and industrial Midwest, the data shows, with the odds notably low in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. By contrast, some of the highest rates occur in the Northeast, Great Plains and West, including in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle and large swaths of California and Minnesota.

“Where you grow up matters,” said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the study’s authors. “There is tremendous variation across the U.S. in the extent to which kids can rise out of poverty.”

That variation does not stem simply from the fact that some areas have higher average incomes: upward mobility rates, Mr. Hendren added, often differ sharply in areas where average income is similar, like Atlanta and Seattle.

The gaps can be stark. On average, fairly poor children in Seattle — those who grew up in the 25th percentile of the national income distribution — do as well financially when they grow up as middle-class children — those who grew up at the 50th percentile — from Atlanta.

Geography mattered much less for well-off children than for middle-class and poor children, according to the results. In an economic echo of Tolstoy’s line about happy families being alike, the chances that affluent children grow up to be affluent are broadly similar across metropolitan areas.

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