Community Ties Boost Social Mobility

Excerpt:

For a state accustomed to faring well on many economic and policy comparisons, North Carolina’s middling score on social mobility ought to make us uncomfortable.

According to a fascinating new report from the Archbridge Institute, our state ranks 23rd in fostering social mobility. Archbridge, a think tank with a mission to “lift barriers to human flourishing,” uses four categories of indicators associated with social mobility to evaluate each of the 50 states: 1) entrepreneurship and growth, 2) institutions and the rule of law, 3) education and skills development, and 4) social capital.

Archbridge president Gonzalo Schwartz and his coauthors, economists Justin Callais and Vincent Geloso, took the resulting state scores and compared them to outcome measures such as poverty, absolute mobility (the expected income rank of someone born in the 25th percentile) and relative mobility (the relationship between a parent’s income mobility rank and a child’s mobility rank).

The Archbridge score explained at least a fifth of the variation in mobility rates. The association was even stronger for poverty rates. So, yes, the study really does appear to capture key factors influencing social mobility across the country.

Read the full article at The Carolina Journal.

Read the Social Mobility in the 50 States report here.