> It also helps if you don't have entrenched poor communities Even still, the article does address this - "another economics professor at Brigham Young told me

> It also helps if you don't have entrenched poor communities Even still, the article does address this - "another economics professor at Brigham Young told me that his church ward had recently deliberately expanded its boundaries to include a nearby trailer park." I think this is a key ingredient to effective upward mobility: mixing of social classes. If you have setting multiple times a a week (church) where entrenched poor (trailer park) can mingle and interact with middle and upper class, that's a huge boon for the poor. Simply giving money to the poor in the form of an impersonal government check on the other hand is very ineffective.