The United States has long been called the “land of opportunity,” but it’s a big country. Geographically, this July 4, where are those places of opportunity?
At Nationhood Lab, the project I run at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center, we decided to find out. We revisited the results of a classic study on intergenerational upward mobility by Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues. Using anonymized Internal Revenue Service tax data, Chetty’s group found substantial regional differences in how much more a kid raised in a low-income family would be making when they reached the end of their twenties. The Southeastern U.S. performed worst, the Northeast, West Coast, and Great Plains best, a finding that prompted the researchers to wonder out loud why this was the case. “We hope that future research will be able to shed light on this question by using the mobility statistics constructed here,” they wrote.
We thought we’d see what would happen when running Chetty et al.’s data through the American Nations model, which defines cultural regions via rival settlement patterns as far back as the 17th Century and the ideological and cultural characteristics they imparted on different parts of the North American continent.
The model came out of my 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, which showed how our rival 17th, 18th, and early 19th century colonization projects settled mutually exclusive strips of much of the continent, laying down cultural norms and attitudes toward authority, honor, diversity, government, individual liberty, communitarianism, identity, and belonging. These have shaped our history, constitutional structure, and our varied social and political environments, past and present. (I have written about its political implications in the Monthly for the past 14 years; you can find a detailed summary here.)
Our county-level analysis of Chetty’s data found that—despite the presumably substantial influence of state-level policies on inequality—the American Nations cultural boundaries could be readily discerned in the county-level results, even within states riven by major early colonization fault lines, like Arkansas, Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, and New Jersey.
Regions that were slave-centered societies until the mid-1860s and had formal racial caste systems until the mid-1960s have the worst social mobility, after First Nation. This indigenous-controlled region in the far northern tier of this continent also has alarmingly bad life expectancy, suicide, and various health statistics. This finding is consistent with Chetty et al.’s observations that informal, present-day racial segregation in housing, schools, and the like is highly correlated with poor social mobility, including for white people growing up in those places.
To this, I would add that the Deep South and—the Chesapeake Country—were societies built on the premise that people are not equal and that inequality (and, in the past, slavery) are natural and even desirable aspects of society, as they were in Ancient Greece and Rome. Historically, these regions actively avoided social investments that level the playing field—public schools, health care, social supports for the poor, and the like—to maintain oligarchic or aristocratic control. (And the Deep South still does so.) In my scholarly work, I term these individualistic cultures, where taxes are low and services, regulations, and public social infrastructure are weak by design
For clarity, here’s a map of this metric—what scholars call “Absolute Upward Mobility”—in each of the American Nations as a whole:
The best-performing region is New Netherland, the Dutch-colonized area around what is now New York City, which was, from the 1640s onward, a society of “self-made men” and later spawned the “American Dream” narrative in American life. There, kids from families at the 25th percentile of income grew up to be in the 44.5th percentile at age thirty. That’s 6.1 percent higher than the Deep South, and a whopping 15.1 percent better than First Nation, where centuries of imperial neglect and exploitation have severely damaged communities and social fabric.
All three “western” regions also performed very well, with Left Coast second in the country—with children making a mean ascent to the 43.3rd percentile—and El Norte and the Far West at the 43rd. These regions—especially the Left Coast—are more inclined to invest in public goods than their southern counterparts, causing them to have far better health and wellness outcomes and life expectancy. Two other strongly communitarian-minded cultures, Yankeedom and the Midlands, are just behind at 42.6 and 42.5, respectively.
This individualistic vs communitarian orientation may also explain why Greater Appalachia—where individuals prize their self-worth and have historically resisted overlords of all sorts—doesn’t do much better than the oligarchic lowland Southern regions. Appalachian culture prizes the dignity and honor of ordinary people, but it’s also hostile to having strong institutions or governments of any form, resulting in poor and underfunded social supports and services and a weak regulatory environment. Since the early 20th Century, the region’s people have left or engaged in cross-regional migrant work as avenues to social mobility. This is likely why children raised in northern and central West Virginia perform as well as they do in absolute mobility. In 2010, West Virginia had the most significant “brain drain” in the country. (You can read more details of all of this in our post on this work.)
We saw the same patterns when we looked at where economic pain has been most concentrated. One measure was creditworthiness, inspired by this map of average FICO credit scores published by the Washington Post a couple of years ago:
Notice there are many extremely wealthy counties in that big gold blob and many extremely poor ones in the blue one. They’re sorted not by poverty, but by geographic region. “Even some of the South’s biggest, most dynamic cities—think Atlanta or Dallas—have the same below-average credit scores as their more rural Southern neighbors,” the Post’s Andrew Van Dam wrote. “Within every income bracket, the typical Southerner has a lower credit score than someone who lives in the Northeast, Midwest, or West.”
Indeed, using the underlying data from the Urban Institute, we did a rough calculation of the mean FICO score in each American Nations region in 2020. Again, the most individualistic regions were clustered at the bottom of the list, with New France and the Deep South at 674 and Greater Appalachia at 688. The aggressively communitarian ones (excepting, again, First Nation) monopolized the top. Left Coast topped the list at 737, followed by Greater (727), Yankeedom (723), and New Netherland (722). The other regions, as is often the case, fell in between.
To poke at what might be driving this, we used county-level data from the Urban Institute’s “Debt in America” project to plot the percentage of borrowers who were 60 or more days delinquent on an auto loan or lease or a retail installment loan as of August 2023. As you can see in the map below, there’s almost a more than two-to-one difference between the delinquency share of borrowers on the Left Coast and that in the Deep South or between Yankeedom and New France. Once again, the best-performing regions have aggressively communitarian dominant ideologies, and the worst-performing ones have an aggressively individualistic ethos. (Close followers of our work will notice Tidewater—despite its 21st-century transformation into a highly progressive region via the “federal halos” effect—has statistics comparable to its erstwhile individualistic Dixie bloc partners, Greater Appalachia.)
We also looked at the share of people with credit reports who had medical debt in collections, based on August 2023 credit agency data shared with the Urban Institute. It revealed a very similar pattern, with New France, Deep South, and Greater Appalachia all coming in with more than double Yankeedom’s rate and more than triple that of New Netherland or Left Coast. As you can see in our article on the subject, which mirrored the geographic patterns in the percentage of people lacking health insurance, though “red” states that opted to expand Medicare performed better than their regions at large.
Two years ago, I argued in the Monthly’s pages that the United States’ long-term survival depends on pulling back from our laissez-faire vortex to make the shared investments and anti-monopoly measures that make an economy and society work for everyone, not just an oligarchy. That work will be even more challenging after Donald Trump and Elon Musk are done wrecking the federal institutions that can help make that happen. During this time, the disparities between America’s lands of opportunity and despair will only grow.
The post This July 4, Where is America’s Land of Opportunity? appeared first on Washington Monthly.
Continue reading...