Achieving social mobility is undoubtedly one of the prickliest problems facing governments around the world today.  It seems intuitive to believe that the nature of local communities plays a big role in how effective those communities are at facilitating upward mobility.  The scale of this influence was highlighted by a recently published study from Harvard.

The trigger for the study was the hypothesis that black children from low-income communities suffered disproportionately compared to white children from similar backgrounds.  This was emphasized when those black children move to better neighborhoods, at which point their life chances improve significantly. Sadly, the access to such neighborhoods is not something that many black families have.

Equal opportunities

The researchers examined data from the Opportunity Atlas to explore the negative role things such as violence and incarceration play in upward mobility, whilst also exploring the positive role things such as trust in the neighborhood and a cohesive community played.

They examined several communities in Chicago, which was chosen for its typical characteristics, and explored their progression from children into adulthood along various metrics, including incarceration rates, income, teenage pregnancy and so on.  The heavy segregation of neighborhoods in Chicago made direct comparison of the life chances of black and white boys from the same neighborhood incredibly difficult.

Nonetheless, they found that intergenerational mobility was lowest, and life chances worst, in communities where community organizations and social control were absent, and where violence and incarceration were highest.  Perhaps most alarming of all was the relative exposure to toxic environments. Whilst both black and white children suffered when exposed to such conditions, black children were disproportionately likely to be so. Indeed, the most exposed white children in the study had similar exposure levels as the least exposed black children,

“Past interventions that have cleaned up the physical environment and reduced toxic hazards indicate that environmental policy is in part crime policy. Our results suggest a broader conclusion: Reducing violence, reforming criminal justice through deincarceration, and maintaining environmental health together make for social mobility policy,” the authors explain.