Location matters – enormously. If you’re poor and live in the Philadelphia area, it’s better to be in Bucks County than in Cumberland County or Atlantic County. Not only that, the younger you are when you move to Bucks, the better you will do on average. Children who move at earlier ages are less likely to become single parents, more likely to go to college and more likely to earn more.
But even Bucks County is below the national average. Every year a poor child spends in Bucks County addssubtracts about $170 tofrom his or her annual household income at age 26, compared with a childhood spent in the average American county. Over the course of a full childhood, which is up to age 20 for the purposes of this analysis, the difference adds up to about $3,500, or 13 percent, moreless in average income as a young adult.
These findings, particularly those that show how much each additional year matters, are from a new study by Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren that has huge consequences on how we think about poverty and mobility in the United States. The pair, economists at Harvard, have long been known for their work on income mobility, but the latest findings go further. Now, the researchers are no longer confined to talking about which counties merely correlate well with income mobility; new data suggests some places actually cause it.
Consider Philadelphia County, Pa., the focus of this articleour best guess for where you might be reading this article. (Feel free to change to another place by selecting a new county on the map or using the search boxes throughout this page.)
It’s below average in helping poor children up the income ladder. It ranks 653rd out of 2,478 counties, better than about 26 percent of counties. It is relatively worse for poor boys than it is for poor girls.
Here are the estimates for how much 20 years of childhood in Philadelphia County adds or takes away from a child’s income (compared with an average county), along with the national percentile ranking for each.
[For more go to http://www.nytimes.com/interac...2&abg=1&_r=0]
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