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> For a girl raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Salt Lake City is a very weird place. I went to Utah precisely because it’s weird. More specifically, b

> For a girl raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Salt Lake City is a very weird place. I went to Utah precisely because it’s weird. More specifically, because economic data suggest that modest Salt Lake City, population 192,672, does something that the rest of us seem to be struggling with: It helps people move upward from poverty. By this criterion, should Salt Lake City be so weird to a New Yorker? Upward Mobility in the 50 Biggest Cities: 1. San Jose 12.9% 2. San Francisco 12.2% 3. Washington DC 11.0% 4. Seattle 10.9% 5. Salt Lake City 10.8% 6. New York 10.5% ... 50. Charlotte 4.4% Source: Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/documents/ http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/documents/

Retric 10y ago
Salt Lake City is not much better than NYC making the article very disingenuous. A map makes the trends more clear: https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/the-complex-story-of-race-and-upward-mobility/?_r=0 https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/the-complex-st... The difference between good and average is not much, but the difference between average and bad is huge. The traditional 'south' is vastly worse of than most of the US. PS: Further, when comparing NYC vs Midwest is what it means to be upwardly mobile. NYC the top 1% is vastly higher than the 1% in SLS.
DINKDINK 10y ago
I wasn't able to glean it from the website (on mobile) but what method is used to distinguish between the phenomenon of "the income distribution of the generation living here now is more than the previous generation" vs "for this specific family, the children make more than the parents" It's seems to me that if a government instituted policies that in effect make it so that poor people cannot survive given the other economic pressures (for example: restrictive new-housing permitting in SF) that that phenomenon could lead to a fallacious inference from "the income distribution of SF citizens has gone up!" to "this generation of SF citizens is earning more than their parents" Additionally, how meaningful is it to a child that their income is ~10% higher than their parents if their cost of living has increased beyond that. Essentially all the surplus has been consumed. Edit: it seems that the intergenerarional method is potentially sound "Linking Children to Parents Parent(s) defined as first person(s) who claim child as a dependent Most children are linked to parents based on tax returns in 1996 We link approximately 95% of children to parents"
vitus 10y ago
Salt Lake City feels like very much an outlier, though, based on the slides -- look at slide 46, Upward mobility (Y_25) Adjusted for Differences in Cost of Living. Because the cost of living in places like San Jose and SF are much higher than Salt Lake City, even the upper-middle class are relatively poor. My guess is that kids who grow up in these supercities and get college educations tend to move to other supercities, where even though they might make low 6-figure incomes, they spend a large fraction of that on housing. edit: Also, parents at the (cost-of-living-adjusted) 25th percentile in more expensive regions make more than parents at the 25th percentile in cheaper regions (and are hence more likely to be college-educated, I'd guess).
jessriedel 10y ago
Conjecture: the number one driver of a city's upward mobility is fraction of foreign-born population. Poor foreigners move to US with few skills, and then their children do fine. Note that this mechanism has nothing to do with the differences between social services in different cities. Let's check: Out of the 50 largest cities, here are where those high-mobility cities rank by percentage foreign-born. 3. San Jose 38.1% 4. New York 37.7% 5. San Francisco 34.1% 21. Seattle 17.1% 30. Washington DC 12.0% and Charlotte is #25 with 13.7% foreign born. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_foreign-born_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... So I'd say this conjecture looks pretty good for explaining cities that have the very highest mobility. (I could not get foreign-born data on Salt Lake City because it's population is less than 200k. I don't understand why your source would list it as part of the "50 Biggest Cities in the US," since the US' 50th city is Arlington, TX with ~380k.)
- gragas 10y ago
  Your conjecture says nothing about the people already living there. When you only take people who meet the H1-B requirements, of course it is the case that the percentage of foreign-born people is strongly correlated with upward mobility; all of the foreigners move upwards.
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    The whole point of my comment is that looking at raw mobility data doesn't tell you much about social service effectiveness because raw mobility is dominated by immigration effects.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- hughdbrown 10y ago
  The Spearman rank correlation of your two sets is 61% (after dropping cities that are not common to both). https://gist.github.com/hughdbrown/94016d0f477b855a893514131fc91f99 https://gist.github.com/hughdbrown/94016d0f477b855a893514131... Sadly, Salt Lake City is dropped from the set because of the missing foreign-born data.

Retric 10y ago

Salt Lake City is not much better than NYC making the article very disingenuous. A map makes the trends more clear: https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/the-complex-story-of-race-and-upward-mobility/?_r=0 https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/the-complex-st... The difference between good and average is not much, but the difference between average and bad is huge. The traditional 'south' is vastly worse of than most of the US. PS: Further, when comparing NYC vs Midwest is what it means to be upwardly mobile. NYC the top 1% is vastly higher than the 1% in SLS.

DINKDINK 10y ago

I wasn't able to glean it from the website (on mobile) but what method is used to distinguish between the phenomenon of "the income distribution of the generation living here now is more than the previous generation" vs "for this specific family, the children make more than the parents" It's seems to me that if a government instituted policies that in effect make it so that poor people cannot survive given the other economic pressures (for example: restrictive new-housing permitting in SF) that that phenomenon could lead to a fallacious inference from "the income distribution of SF citizens has gone up!" to "this generation of SF citizens is earning more than their parents" Additionally, how meaningful is it to a child that their income is ~10% higher than their parents if their cost of living has increased beyond that. Essentially all the surplus has been consumed. Edit: it seems that the intergenerarional method is potentially sound "Linking Children to Parents Parent(s) defined as first person(s) who claim child as a dependent Most children are linked to parents based on tax returns in 1996 We link approximately 95% of children to parents"

vitus 10y ago

Salt Lake City feels like very much an outlier, though, based on the slides -- look at slide 46, Upward mobility (Y_25) Adjusted for Differences in Cost of Living. Because the cost of living in places like San Jose and SF are much higher than Salt Lake City, even the upper-middle class are relatively poor. My guess is that kids who grow up in these supercities and get college educations tend to move to other supercities, where even though they might make low 6-figure incomes, they spend a large fraction of that on housing. edit: Also, parents at the (cost-of-living-adjusted) 25th percentile in more expensive regions make more than parents at the 25th percentile in cheaper regions (and are hence more likely to be college-educated, I'd guess).

jessriedel 10y ago

Conjecture: the number one driver of a city's upward mobility is fraction of foreign-born population. Poor foreigners move to US with few skills, and then their children do fine. Note that this mechanism has nothing to do with the differences between social services in different cities. Let's check: Out of the 50 largest cities, here are where those high-mobility cities rank by percentage foreign-born. 3. San Jose 38.1% 4. New York 37.7% 5. San Francisco 34.1% 21. Seattle 17.1% 30. Washington DC 12.0% and Charlotte is #25 with 13.7% foreign born. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_foreign-born_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... So I'd say this conjecture looks pretty good for explaining cities that have the very highest mobility. (I could not get foreign-born data on Salt Lake City because it's population is less than 200k. I don't understand why your source would list it as part of the "50 Biggest Cities in the US," since the US' 50th city is Arlington, TX with ~380k.)

gragas 10y ago
Your conjecture says nothing about the people already living there. When you only take people who meet the H1-B requirements, of course it is the case that the percentage of foreign-born people is strongly correlated with upward mobility; all of the foreigners move upwards.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  The whole point of my comment is that looking at raw mobility data doesn't tell you much about social service effectiveness because raw mobility is dominated by immigration effects.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hughdbrown 10y ago
The Spearman rank correlation of your two sets is 61% (after dropping cities that are not common to both). https://gist.github.com/hughdbrown/94016d0f477b855a893514131fc91f99 https://gist.github.com/hughdbrown/94016d0f477b855a893514131... Sadly, Salt Lake City is dropped from the set because of the missing foreign-born data.