This week, a team of economists released a massive new data set on prosperity at the neighborhood level in the U.S., The Washington Post reported. Called the Opportunity Atlas, the data builds on Raj Chetty of Harvard University’s previous work on inequality and opportunity, tracing how the environments children grow up in shape who they become as adults. Much of the focus has been on the plight of children from low-income families, and the social and economic barriers preventing them from pulling themselves out of poverty. But this data strongly suggests that the same forces holding lower-class kids back are also creating difficulties for middle- and upper-class families. Consider a child born between 1979 and 1983 to a middle-class family with an income right in the middle of the U.S. income distribution — what economists call the 50th income percentile, or about $55,000 in 2015 dollars. Because family income has a huge effect on children’s eventual outcomes as adults, we’d expect that child to end up more or less in the 50th income percentile when they grow up. At the national level, that’s true: The average child born to a 50th percentile family in the early 1980s ends up exactly at the 50th percentile today. But if you drill down beyond the national average, you find that children’s outcomes vary significantly by where they grew up.
