After a few weeks that have been eventful in both the usual ways (end-of-semester rush) and some not-so-usual ones (you all know what's been going on in Baltimore), I'm back in the saddle with a few overdue posts, all of which will be mercifully short.
First, on those recent events in Baltimore. An astounding new study described in today's New York Times confirms that Baltimore City is one of the worst places in the country to grow up if you are poor. (Here is the Times's graphic summary of some major points of the study, which you can tailor to your own geographic area; here is a summary by the study's authors; and here is the text of the study.) The study examines data on five million families who moved from one county in the United States to another, concluding that the geographic location where children grow up materially effects their future earning potential. Using these data, the study builds a model of the geographic factors that seem to prevent "intergenerational mobility" (the capacity to increase income as compared to one's parents). Those factors read like a list of the usual suspects: highly concentrated poverty, high income inequality, poor schools, a low percentage of two-parent families, and high crime rates. The higher the degree of these factors in your neighborhood, the worse your chances of doing better than your parents, financially speaking.
The study's authors then rank all of the nation's 2,478 counties according to these negative factors, correlating to variables such as gender and income level. Guess what: my county (Baltimore City, which is in fact a stand-alone county) ranks dead worst among the nation's 100 most populous counties (and in the bottom 1% of all counties) in effects on future income for low-income children. This means that, measured by effects on lifetime income, there is almost no worse place in the country to grow up poor than in Baltimore.
So it's a Baltimore problem, right? Yes, in the sense that the hopelessness of entrenched poverty is particularly bad and particularly evident in Baltimore, as the recent unrest has made painfully but necessarily clear. But it's far from just a Baltimore problem. Baltimore is only the worst example of a problem that plagues most large American cities. Consider the other nine counties that placed among the 10 worst among large counties in the study, listed here from #99 to #91: Mecklenburg, NC (home to Charlotte); Hillsborough, FL (Tampa and St. Petersburg); Orange County, FL (Orlando); Cook County, IL (Chicago); Fresno County, CA; Wayne County, MI (Detroit); Milwaukee County, WI; Bronx County, NY; and Pima County, AZ (Tucson). In each of these mostly urban locales, a poor child can expect to earn between 12% and 17% less over the course of his or her lifetime than the average poor child growing up in America.
The factors that tend to entrench poverty exist in cities from coast to coast. That should concern everybody, not just Americans who live in the worst of these locations. There is the sheer self-interest of wanting to avoid the chaos in our cities that the anger and frustration of entrenched poverty can cause, as we've seen illustrated all too vividly in recent days. But bigger than that is the moral imperative: it is simply unjust to sustain a system in which the future of so many children is dictated primarily by the zip code into which they happen to have been born. America was founded in part on a rejection of what Thomas Jefferson called the "artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth" that had dominated Europe since the middle ages. The entrenchment of American poverty is an artificial peonage founded solely on wealth and birth -- an affront to core American ideals.
And peonage and aristocracy almost always travel together (the one in steerage, the other in first class). Growing up in Baltimore, it turns out, isn't a bad thing for everybody. The study also reveals that the children of the wealthiest 1% in the City actually do better over a lifetime than the average American top-one-percenter. While the richest get richer, the poorest grow more and more hopeless. That's not an America any of us should want our kids to grow up in.
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