This is a very interesting interactive article but I have to disagree with what they think their methodology allows them to conclude:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/03/upshot/the-best-and-worst-places-to-grow-up-how-your-area-compares.html The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares Children who grow up in some places go on to earn much more than they would if they grew up elsewhere. MAY 4, 2015 You can enter (or the computer may automatically sense) your location and it will do the calculations that inform the article. There is nothing wrong with the headline or the subheading but it gets sketchy further in. (Blanks refer to information from the article that will change depending on your chosen location). "Every year a poor child spends in _____ County add/subtracts about $__ to/from his or her annual household income at age 26, compared with a childhood spent in the average American county. Over the course of a full childhood, which is up to age 20 for the purposes of this analysis, the difference adds up to about $____, or _ percent, more/less in average income as a young adult. These findings, particularly those that show how much each additional year matters, are from a new study<http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/> by Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren that has huge consequences on how we think about poverty and mobility in the United States. The pair, economists at Harvard, have long been known for their work on income mobility<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-income-ladder-location-matters.html?pagewanted=all>, but the latest findings go further. Now, the researchers are no longer confined to talking about which counties merely correlate well with income mobility; new data suggests some places actually cause it." They later detail the alchemy by which this demographic data was able to produce causal conclusions: "To remove variation that was simply caused by different types of people living in different areas, Mr. Chetty and Mr. Hendren based the latest estimates on the incomes of more than five million children who moved between areas when they were growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. These estimates are causal: They suggest moving a given child to a new area would in fact cause him or her to do better or worse." I would argue that what it shows is that children who were moved to certain areas did better or worse. Of course, these children were not randomly chosen to move so I wonder if there might not be other factors related to who moved and who didn't. I guess I don't have to worry about that. It seems all it takes to improve outcomes is to call Mayflower and get on the road. Rick Dr. Rick Froman<http://bit.ly/16z4vcd> Professor of Psychology Box 3519 John Brown University 2000 W. University Siloam Springs, AR 72761 [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> (479) 524-7295 --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=45355 or send a blank email to leave-45355-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
