“Your chances of achieving the American Dream are almost two times higher … if you are growing up in Canada than in the United States,” said Harvard’s Raj Chetty at a Center on Children and Families (CCF) event held on Monday. Chetty, the Bloomberg Professor of Economics and a leading scholar on opportunity and intergenerational mobility, presented his latest research on how where one grows up has a huge impact on success later in life.

Chetty and colleagues calculated upward mobility for every metro and rural area in the United States. 

The heat map below shows the chances that a child born in the bottom fifth of the income distribution in that particular place will reach the top fifth later in life.

My more perceptive readers may be thinking, “Ben, you usually advocate for equality of opportunity, not outcomes, what gives?”

This is a fair observation. Generally speaking, I do believe more in equality of opportunity than equality in outcomes. But these two concepts cannot be fully separated. In fact, they intersect at what has become an important issue for politicians, academics, and social scientists alike–social mobility.

Observing social mobility outcomes at the macro level provides insight into opportunity (or lack thereof) at the micro level. At more macro levels (neighborhood, city, county, etc), the differences in individuals’ development experiences (wealth, culture, parental values, personal ability, luck, etc.) are naturally smoothed out. Taking into consideration every possible permutation of personal development, these forces offset one another. What we are left with is the “average” (for lack of a better word) personal development experience.  

This “average” experience leaves a common factor–public goods and services–as the variable explaining why certain areas recognize greater social mobility than others (as shown on Mr. Chetty’s map). The fact that the administration of many important public services is carried out at these same levels reinforces the idea that social mobility outcomes are the result of policy choice(s).

Once we get past the question of “if” government programs can impact people’s opportunities, we can focus on which programs are most effective in promoting social mobility. Data mapping serves an important role here, highlighting areas that may have a working policy mix (although since economic development is context sensitive, even the seemingly best policy mix must be adapted to local realities to be effective).

The question then becomes how to pay for the programs which enable equality of opportunity. Fiscal debates are always implicitly an often explicitly shaped by underlying budgetary positions. The unwillingness of governments around the world to engage in stimulus spending despite low interest rates and high un(der)employment (a liquidity trap) is case-in-point.

In order to pay for the services needed to enhance social mobility in poorer neighborhoods, significant investments are needed. This necessitates higher effective tax rates on the ultra-wealthy (which in turn requires a multi-faceted approach, closing loopholes in capital gains, income, and inheritance/gift taxes to name a few); people whose wealth is often unrelated to productivity.

The economic outcomes of the wealthiest ultimately must be impacted in order to finance programs that promote equality of opportunity. This fact, however, does not necessitate class warfare between the lower, middle, and upper-middle classes–the vast majority of the America’s citizenry.

The American economy must work for everybody who is willing to work hard to succeed, regardless of their socioeconomic background. Once this condition is met, inequality is not only defensible, it actually spurs hard work and innovation. Unfortunately, contemporary America is nowhere near this “good inequality”; our inequality is not the result of meritocracy, but primarily the result a political process / tax code beholden to wealthy interests and an outdated criminal justice system.