Upward mobility is supposed to be the keystone of the American Dream. But a new study suggests that that part of the American Dream is all but dead in large chunks of the country. If you were born into a low-income family in the southeast or parts of the industrial Midwest, you can pretty much
forget about rising to the top of the income ladder. In fact, kids growing up at the 25th percentile in Seattle do as well as kids growing up at the 50th percentile in Atlanta.
The researchers concluded that larger tax credits for the poor and higher taxes on the affluent seemed to improve income mobility only slightly. The economists also found only modest or no correlation between mobility and the number of local colleges and their tuition rates or between mobility and the amount of extreme wealth in a region.
But the researchers identified four broad factors that appeared to affect income mobility, including the size and dispersion of the local middle class. All else being equal, upward mobility tended to be higher in metropolitan areas where poor families were more dispersed among mixed-income neighborhoods.
Income mobility was also higher in areas with more two-parent households, better elementary schools and high schools, and more civic engagement, including membership in religious and community groups.
Regions with larger black populations had lower upward-mobility rates. But the researchers’ analysis suggested that this was not primarily because of their race. Both white and black residents of Atlanta have low upward mobility, for instance.
This is all correlation, not causation—and indeed, it's unlikely that such a pervasive and powerful pattern comes from any two or three policies. When you're looking at something correlated with housing patterns, civic engagement, school quality, and the racial composition of the population, you're looking at something deeply shaped by history and by a thousand policies, many of them non-obvious, some of them no longer the law. We can see reflected in this map the slave and Jim Crow south and some of the geography of the Great Migration, but it's not as if history stopped moving in those moments; the lack of upward mobility has surely been reinforced repeatedly since.
So many policies favoring the rich are justified, these days, by the claim that anyone can become rich and reap their benefits. But we see here that that's far from being the case. Similarly, Republicans often assail programs helping poor people survive as encouraging poverty by taking away incentives for people to strive. If that was true, though, we'd see the greatest mobility in the states with the most punitive policies toward poor people. Again, not remotely the case. There may be no single simple policy conclusion to draw from this map, but it's safe to say that the broad political and economic cultures, past and present, of some states are not only not promoting upward mobility, they're blocking it.
