
The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up in the U.S. - nepstein
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/03/upshot/the-best-and-worst-places-to-grow-up-how-your-area-compares.html
======
Yabood
Interesting read. In 2008, with the help of the US embassy in Baghdad, my
family and I were admitted as refugees. An American friend of mine who I
worked with back in Baghdad helped us rent a place in Reston, a small town in
Fairfax county. The rent was $1250 for a small 2 bedroom condo. For refugees
like us with over 20K in debt, the rent was extremely high, but we wanted to
be in this area because there were a lot more opportunities compared to other
places we could have gone to. I was 23 years old at the time, and within five
years I went from being a support engineer, to a support lead, then a manager,
then a director, then a CEO of a Bain Capital Ventures backed company to now
attempting to build my own company. Compared to many other Iraqis I know who
were admitted as refugees and lived in other areas of the country, I am doing
better than most (career wise). Granted, I had lots of help, and was lucky to
have had the chance to work with and learn from many bright people, but I
truly believe that being here in this area is one of the top reasons I had
more success than others. Obviously I am not saying this the best area in the
country, but it's a pretty good place to be in and start from.

~~~
pitt1980
You might find this episode of This American Life interesting

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/504/h...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/504/how-i-got-into-college)

similar story of a refugee attributing his good fortune to chance

I'll avoid posting any spoilers

~~~
Yabood
I listen to This American Life podcast occasionally, but never heard this one
before. I really enjoyed it, thank you. I understand why Emir consider's
himself lucky, and I think that most immigrants do too. Maybe because we never
thought it was possible for us to escape our war torn countries and have
normal lives again. I really don't know, but I do feel lucky. By the way,
checkout The Moth. I think you'll really like it.

------
potench
This is a very cool interactive article. You land on its best guess for the
county you are in (easy, sure) but you don't realize that until you've read
through what feels like a "local news" article detailing the average income
opportunities and discrepancies in the county and surrounding areas. The focus
is on each county instead of the typical approach to these executions which is
to provide big filtering options and a heat map and tabular data.

~~~
noobiemcfoob
Yeah, I respect the effect, but it was really weird at first. I don't live in
a county that makes national news but on occasion, so to see the New York
Times talking specifically about my county and its neighbors ticked something
in my head and made me start to think this was a problem specifically in my
area of national note, not the application of a national study to my locale.

~~~
sonabinu
felt too personalized and felt like someone was snooping in on me ;)

------
beat
As someone who lifted myself out of childhood poverty by my bootstraps, a few
observations...

1\. Role model availability plays a _huge_ part in what kids think they can
be. I didn't have good role models when I grew up. Except for teachers and
doctors I encountered, I rarely met educated middle-class adults, and even
more rarely met upper class. I think this is a big aspect of the neighborhood
thing... what kinds of people live in that neighborhood? What is the social
life of the parents?

2\. Tribalism goes both ways. The poor distrust the middle class as much as
the middle class distrusts the poor. A great deal of the business transactions
the poor experience are exploitation, businesses that take advantage of the
weakness of the poor, either by force (this is the only deal you'll get), or
by ignorance (trust me, you'll do great!).

So the benefits of living in a better neighborhood are that there are better
adult examples for children, and there are professional services that have to
provide to more sophisticated and strong middle-class customers as well as the
poor.

~~~
Kalium
As I understand it, this comes with the drawback of separating people from the
communities they came from. For better or for worse.

In public policy, that's going to be a killer.

------
bkjelden
Interesting, I grew up in eastern SD, pretty much right in the big cluster of
deep blue counties in the middle of the country on the map.

I'm trying to think of what could be responsible for the above average
outcomes in this area, and not coming up with much. The best reason I have is
that it's a very family focused area. The 'default' path for most people is to
get married, have kids, and put parenting before their career. This is quite
different from what I see now, living in the bay area.

~~~
epistasis
I'm from that area as well, and I thought the standout difference was that the
schools were just really really good ~15-40 years ago. There's been a
divestment from education in recent years, so if my theory is correct we
should see worse outcomes in a decade or so.

~~~
lstyls
I grew up in central MN, and I agree that strong support of public education
is likely the driving factor.

------
absherwin
Areas where children are disproportionately less likely to be married than
their same-income peers at age 26 will be reported as having lower income
mobility in this analysis since it uses household income.

------
danans
It seems like this analysis has independently identified locations of long-
term concentrated high poverty in the US. It's also interesting to note how
much smaller the effect of growing-up in a location has on the future earnings
of those in the upper classes.

Counties are a crude way in which to break down this data, however, as many
urban counties comprise a huge variance in income.

In metros like the Bay Area, where people routinely commute across county
borders for work and housing, this analysis doesn't show how upper-middle-
class to wealthy areas like San Mateo effectively outsource the housing of the
working poor to places like Alameda county (mostly to places like East
Oakland), thus compounding the concentration of poverty.

At the least, I'd like to see the actual income/wealth (and race) breakdown of
the population of the counties highlighted, to give more context to the maps.

EDIT: clarification

~~~
Spooky23
I think urbanization matters in this county level set of stats.

Look at upstate NY, counties in central NY with economies in freefall have
good outcomes vs more prosperous counties with less urban population.

Having grown up in a small town in my teenage years and NYC in my younger
years, it makes sense to me. People care about the neighbors in small towns.
In the city, not so much.

------
noobiemcfoob
The article is mildly interesting in its own right, however, the localization
of the writing based on the selected county (defaults to a guess based off of
your IP address I imagine) is extremely...unnerving? Not because I like to
think I'm hidden. I know my location is easy to find, but the way the article
went about it was just off.

I think if it made more of an effort upfront to show that certain aspects of
the following article will change based on your location and identified what
those parts were, the effect would have been cool instead of weird.

------
cgy1
Looking at a handful of examples throughout the country, it seems like the
poor have better outcomes growing up in suburban, mostly-white counties (e.g.,
rich suburbs) versus urban, racially diverse counties (e.g., counties
encompassing the major city center of a metro area)

~~~
bnolsen
Because the "inner city" culture demonizes people who live and work hard in
the suburbs.

I noticed this in high school, when it started becoming popular for inner city
families to ship their kids out to the suburban schools to get them away from
"bad influences". Many of those kids had already been programmed by their
peers to think that working hard and doing well was uncool.

~~~
parennoob
I think American culture as a whole demonizes people who work hard and try to
not be too cool or edgy.

~~~
marincounty
I think the American way is achieving/working hard, but not advertising it.
There's a sense of rebellion in most Americans; and I'm glad it's there. We
don't like conformity. Yes, it can backfire. As to cool, or edgy--I don't
know. It seems like the nerd look is in? (I don't like the thick black
glasses. Especially, if you don't need glasses.)

The American desire to succeed brings a lot of pressure. I sometimes think we
want too much--too quick. I think about our suicide rate and cringe.

~~~
vacri
_We don 't like conformity._

Ooo... yes you do. As an Australian travelling across the US in 2009, I felt a
little stifled at social expectations. Americans like to point at crazy people
and other outliers as examples of their freedom, but there's a lot of social
conservatism. Simple examples include political speeches that love to mention
god (don't even think of being an atheist), and whatever you do, don't
criticise the troops. And there's definitely more conformity against casual
swearing than back home.

One archaic but interesting example was when I stayed with a couple of ex-pat
retirees. I brought them a small present as thanks for letting me stay with
them, apologising that it wasn't much as I was on a shoestring. They mentioned
that amongst their age group, there was this weird phenomenon where if you
visited with someone, it didn't matter how many thank-you presents you bought
during the visit, or how much you spent entertaining your hosts - if you
didn't send a 'thank you' note when you got home, it was a minor scandal. They
did care to mention that it didn't really happen with younger people anymore,
but it was common with their age group.

~~~
andyjdavis
>We don't like conformity.

I forget if there is a name for this phenomena, probably, but people are
strongly biased towards thinking that they are open minded, that they don't
like conformity etc. Everyone likes to think that they are accepting of new
ideas, that they are adventurous, that they are forging their own path and so
on.

Conversely no one likes to them of themselves as being prone to conformity,
sensitive to peer pressure, fearful of ideas that challenge their own
assumptions or fearful of being exposed to criticism or ridicule.

As a result people are very fond of saying that they are open minded and that
they don't like conformity even though its not necessarily borne out by their
actions.

Its also worth keeping in mind that this kind of belief is closely tied to a
person's identity (as they see it) so challenging it can result in them
getting extremely defensive and angry. By challenging it you are pointing out
the gap between how they actually are and how they imagine themselves to be.

/armchair psychology

------
solve
Zoom way out to the national level. Looks like the empty towns in the middle
of nowhere do the best -- because they force you to move out to get a job.
Also, no one there is having decent jobs just appear locally in front of them,
so you have to make yourself look good on paper to get one of those far-away
jobs.

There are other factors that obviously affect this, but looks like that's the
real dominant factor. Drastically changing location is the best way to quickly
increase wage, and these towns do that, like tossing a young bird out of a
nest.

------
lqdc13
By age 26...

At age 26 I was in more debt than I was at any point in my life... Basically
this completely ignores time and money invested in education.

And I'm not sure how one would control for it if the cut-off is at 26, because
people who did odd jobs in college would come out way better off than those
who haven't.

~~~
erroneousfunk
To be fair, it looks at income, not debt or wealth, so the effects of student
loans wouldn't matter (except, perhaps, in indirect ways)

~~~
lqdc13
True, but as you said, income can originate from existing wealth especially
for the very wealthy.

Overall, it looks a little suspicious to me because the Manhattan island looks
like one of the worst places to move to especially for upper class, but also
has one of the highest education levels in the county.

------
pitt1980
The problem with Raj Chetty’s 2013 work on social mobility was that it
generates absurd results — West Virginia is a great place for social mobility,
while Atlanta and Charlotte are terrible — because he refuses to intelligently
consider race in his analysis.

Over the generations, the different races in America regress toward different
means. So white kids growing up in almost all white West Virginia tend to do
better than their parents because they are likely to get the heck out of
supposedly high opportunity West Virginia (which you and me know is the worst
place in White America), especially for places like Charlotte and Atlanta,
which Chetty sees as black holes of low social mobility.

In contrast, Atlanta attracts affluent college graduate black families. Their
kids tend to regress part way back toward the black mean, so it makes Atlanta
look bad under Chetty’s methodology.

But in the real world, his results are close to 180 degrees backwards to wise
advice: if you are white and young in West Virginia, hit the road; if you are
black and looking for a community with a lot of black college graduates to be
good role models for your kids, consider Atlanta’s suburbs.

As I explained on my blog in 2014:

Notice that according to Chetty West Virginia is an oasis of income mobility
in the East, while nearby North Carolina is an abyss of stasis. Yet, lots of
people raised in West Virginia who have something on the ball have moved to
North Carolina to get ahead in life.

Since West Virginia is only about 5% black and has attracted very few
Hispanics and Asians, the bottom 20% of West Virginians in income are majority
white, so their children tend to regress toward the white mean, which is
higher than the black mean. The bottom 20% in income in the Charlotte or
Atlanta area is highly black, so their children tend to regress toward the
black mean. Thus, West Virginia comes out looking better for social mobility
than Atlanta and Charlotte in Chetty’s methodology.

This doesn’t mean that if you had a peek around the Rawlsian curtain of
ignorance, you’d choose to be born in West Virginia because of its strong
social mobility. If you knew you were going to be born white, West Virginia
would probably be last on your list of states to be born into. Nor does it
mean that Blue State policies increase social mobility relative to red state
policies. It’s just mostly Moynihan’s Canadian Border effect in action.

And then I beat up Chetty’s methodology some more here.

The general lesson of the success of Chetty’s Malcolm Gladwell-quality work is
that race is such a minefield that it inclines everybody, even sharp nonwhite
guys like Chetty, into Orwellian crimestop, or protective stupidity.

If we want our presidential candidates to get access to better social policy
discourse, we need to stop wrecking the careers of the Jason Richwines, James
D. Watsons, and Larry Summers for the crime of telling the truth.

[http://www.unz.com/isteve/uh-oh-hillary-listening-to-raj-
che...](http://www.unz.com/isteve/uh-oh-hillary-listening-to-raj-chettys-
social-mobility-theories/?highlight=west+virginia)

------
presidentender
The data seems very weird for my home county (Sanders, MT). A few factors
might contribute to this:

1\. There are a lot of troubled youth 'programs' there. Wealthy parents send
their children to a depopulated part of Montana to keep them out of trouble,
and then they return to the advantages of their family's income. One member of
my high school's graduating class works for his dad's investment bank, for
instance.

2\. The data might not include people who don't graduate high shcool(?) or it
might not include dishwashers and convenience store clerks. I'd like to know
how the data was gathered.

3\. Small sample sizes which include outliers give distorted results. One
early-stage Dropbox engineer makes a big difference when the entire county
graduated 300 people from high school that year.

~~~
lancefisher
The Montana data seemed odd to me too (I'm in Missoula). However, they ranked
Richland county as #1 for income mobility. The oil boom in Sidney is likely a
large part of that data.

------
hellbanTHIS
Wow, it seems to be all about race. Blacks and native Americans get screwed.

------
dankohn1
Very nice analysis of the policy implications of NYT's amazing visualizations:
[http://www.vox.com/2015/5/4/8546709/moving-to-
opportunity](http://www.vox.com/2015/5/4/8546709/moving-to-opportunity)

------
leanthonyrn
It would be nice to have race as a filter/comparison in addition to gender.
Very nice work.

------
mavdi
Says a lot about a mindset, when the best and worst place to grow up is only
measured by income.

------
bkcooper
I was pretty astonished at how low the reported median rents were in the table
near the end. Then I saw the footnote: "Median rent is for 2000, in 2012
dollars."

------
briantmaurer
Two thing in this article are unclear:

1\. Top X% of what? The top 1% of earners in the community? The nation?

2\. Does income data for a "child" reflect back on all the locations they
previously lived or does it reflect solely on the county they currently live
in? e.x. If I am a child who moved many times, and at age 26 live in a place
where I did not grow up, which locations' income differences are affected by
my income?

~~~
steventhedev
Read the fine print at the end.

1\. Annual income of 500k in the 80's and 90's using 2012 dollars 2\. County
kids born from '80 to '86 living in during the 80s and 90s.

Basically, if you don't fit the profile of a family that never moved from the
same house in the suburbs, you aren't included. Also, take a look at the
national map. It would seem the plains are the best place for upward mobility,
but I get the feeling they forgot to control for some confounding variable.

Also, the breakdowns show some Simpsons paradox, where individual counties
might be very good for boys or girls, but are on average much worse. I'm sure
a racial breakdown would show similar issues.

------
A_COMPUTER
I come from a fairly poor family in a smelly, provincial, meth-infested
smalltown in the Midwest, and moved to a place in the Southwest that is much
nicer. I noticed that there was much more measured mobility in my hometown
than where I moved to. And then it occurred to me that because there was
mobility, I could get the hell out. I'm not sure what that means about the
measurements.

------
protomyth
Their county map has some holes. Benson County ND is missing along with a lot
of other counties in the state (haven't looked at other states yet). If you
search Ramsey County ND you can see the blank counties (one of which is a
reservation).

------
jonpfeiffer
As a military brat who rarely spent more than two years in a given location, I
wonder if there is any data pertinent to my case. Anecdotally my peer group
largely out-earned their parents, but that is not really what's being
addressed here.

------
dataker
Interestingly, no matter how rich your family is, you're still worse off in
the West.

------
leshow
I think they are mistaking 'cause' for 'correlation'

~~~
erroneousfunk
Did you mean to say it the other way around? "Mistaking correlation for
causation?" In any case, I don't think they're inaccurately representing the
data. They're taking all the data and saying "children who live here are
likely to make x% more/less than the national average," which is true. You run
the numbers, and that's the result. The correlations _are_ the data.

The article does explicitly discusses this as well, saying: "To remove
variation that was simply caused by different types of people living in
different areas, Mr. Chetty and Mr. Hendren based the latest estimates on the
incomes of more than five million children who moved between areas when they
were growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. These estimates are causal: They
suggest moving a given child to a new area would in fact cause him or her to
do better or worse."

They say that it _suggests_ that this is the case, and discuss what the
researchers did to try to isolate cause.

------
mirimir
I respect the skill behind the IP-specific text. But the approach, albeit
clever, produced a less useful article. Comparing multiple regions requires
knowing the names of relevant counties.

------
jophde
Seems a little inaccurate. My county in Appalachia is showing 17% higher and
blue. The mean salary there is about $20k/yr and the unemployment rate is at
least 20%.

~~~
aidenn0
So if you grow up there and move somewhere with better pay, you'll have a
_huge_ boost to your income?

------
flanbiscuit
No data for the county I grew up in (Miami-Dade in Florida). It's a pretty
dense and popular area to live in, I'm surprised they don't have data for it

------
pc2g4d
The localized text of the article based on where the user agent is located
seems likely to screw up their SEO.

~~~
ghaff
But, fortunately, not all journalism and data presentation has to revolve
around SEO. (I have no idea if your statement is true or not however.)

------
OneOneOneOne
Privacy.

Wow! This is a real sleeper. You risk unknowingly revealing your location when
commenting on this type of story.

~~~
mirimir
Websites always know your IP address. Some forums show you when you post. But
mostly they don't let on.

~~~
scintill76
Yes, but I think the point is that this page's content changes based on your
IP address. By commenting here about what you read there, you may accidentally
give subtle hints about your location to all HN readers, not just this site or
HN's servers.

~~~
mirimir
That's a good point, which didn't occur to me.

------
fapjacks
It shows you a piece of just how tragic Native American reservations are.

------
paulcnichols
Utah is doing fabulous according to this graph.

------
wglb
Heartening: No data for my home county.

------
socialbullets
Because money tells you how well off you are in life. Rob a bank successfully
you have lots of money but a poor life. and this is what the reality!

~~~
erroneousfunk
Sure, but you can't report the income, so it wouldn't show up in this data.

------
trhway
worst (from POV of financial/social outcome) place to grow - i guess it would
be a black family. Best - probably a wealthy white family. Specific county
doesn't really matter.

