Where Opportunity Is Hardest to Find

The inequality of economic mobility has been getting a lot of attention since the release this summer of new research from scholars at Harvard and UC Berkeley quantifying how much harder it is for children in some parts of the United States to grow up and out of poverty than in other places. A child stands a better chance of moving up the income ladder in San Francisco than in Atlanta, for example, or in Salt Lake City compared to Cleveland.

The expanding research (and attention) around this topic underscores two related realities: Your prospects for economic mobility are partly determined by where you live. And that means opportunity itself – often bullishly described as a universal feature of American life – is not exactly universal after all.