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Economic mobility/American dream: not available in the South

Deacon923

Deacon923

Scooter Banks
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This map tells the story in one glance: https://www.npr.org/2018/10/01/649701669/the-american-dream-is-harder-to-find-in-some-neighborhoods

opportunity-map-seamus_wide-a8388226711bd93beb71bc8f956e5f0725b1c012-s1600-c85.png


"You see that for kids turning 30 today, who were born in the mid-1980s, only 50 percent of them go on to earn more than their parents did," Chetty says. "It's a coin flip as to whether you are now going to achieve the American dream."
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The quote is misleading - it's not a coin flip, it's highly dependent on where you are born, and if you are born in a poor neighborhood in the South you are going to stay poor.
 
I wonder if it's a coincidence that the worst public schools are in the SE also.
 
dot com said:
What's up with SD? Are those the Native American counties?
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Basically. There are a lot of tribes in the Dakotas, but ND has fared better with oil and gas. Those places in SD are Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Pine Ridge and Rosebud.
 
harmoniousmonk said:
I wonder if it's a coincidence that the worst public schools are in the SE also.
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Yeah, it is an awful cycle in Mississippi. Poor Public Schools, poor parental support, lack of middle income jobs, etc.... Only way out in my opinion is the long game of education, and not just book smarts, but teaching young men and women how to live. The lifestyle modeled for the vast majority of the lower income children is not conducive to success in life, and the education received is completely inadequate. The obvious result of these factors is that kids grow up to be very similar to the poor, uneducated parent (most of the time singular) that raised him or her. The intrinsic problems of the south make it a very difficult fix. Thanks for sharing the map. That is not surprising, but it is still shockingly sad.
 
mandatory church is probably best

lots of right-to-work states in the red there
 
Those deep red counties pretty much exactly track the Cotton Belt. Interesting how the same problems just keep turning up in the same places for 100s of years.

Economic mobility has gone down significantly across the whole country over the past 40 years as economic/wealth inequality has concentrated the gains at the top. The South takes that story and piles on with disinvestment in public schools, resegregation, and the decline of resource extraction and low-skill manufacturing.
 
somewhat related, Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 an hour for all workers -- full-time, part-time, and seasonal
 
Strickland33 said:
but Wrangor jumps straight to the culture of poverty
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He's not entirely wrong. Locus of control is never truly binary. Poverty, sickness, and racism are not conducive to successful decision making. Poor decision making is contextual, it doesnt happen in the vacuum of Republican message board boot strap hypotheticals.
 
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Jeff Bezos has just raised minimum wage for any job at Amazon to $15/hour.
 
dot com said:
What's up with SD? Are those the Native American counties?
Click to expand...

It appears to be the Cheyenne River Reservation in the north part of the state and the eastern half of the Pine Ridge Reservation in the south. I've been to the Pine Ridge area, just south of Bad Lands National Park, to a lovely area called Conata about 13 years ago and that area was over run with Meth. It was pretty depressing.
 
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