Upward Mobility May Depend on Where You Live

The New York Times has an online article about a study that examined the likelihood that children of parents whose income is in the bottom quintile of an area rising over his or her lifetime as they grow older. In essence, how likely is it that your kids will earn more than you in the future in your area?

The study — based on millions of anonymous earnings records and being released this week by a team of top academic economists — is the first with enough data to compare upward mobility across metropolitan areas. These comparisons provide some of the most powerful evidence so far about the factors that seem to drive people’s chances of rising beyond the station of their birth, including education, family structure and the economic layout of metropolitan areas.

The resulting map, which appears below, is broken into a variety of metropolitan areas - for us this upwards mobility map lumps us into the Syracuse area.

Click to Enlarge

In terms of the actual numbers, here is what the study by Harvard predicts for children int he lowest quintile in our region:

Click to Enlarge

To see how other areas fare, visit New York Times article and the play with the interactive piece about halfway down the page.