Link to the full Poverty & Race Journal issue.
Introduction
This past August, economist Raj Chetty and colleagues published two new papers in Nature, based on a massive dataset and accompanied by detailed maps on Opportunity Insights’ new Social Capital Atlas, that continue to build the economic case for integration – bringing children together within communities, schools, and institutions, and across class differences. Using Facebook data linked to IRS and other datasets, the study made an empirical comparison of three classic forms of social capital and found that “connectedness between different types of people, such as those with low vs. high socioeconomic status” was the strongest predictor of upward economic mobility for low income children – and that these positive impacts were further enhanced by the degree to which children were living and going to school in places where “friending bias” (the tendency to be connected to people in your own SES group) was lowest. Policymakers and advocates were already indebted to Professor Chetty and his co-authors for their 2015 finding that children who move from high poverty to low poverty neighborhoods when they are young have dramatically improved outcomes as adults, and this new research has brought us closer to understanding the mechanisms that drive these outcomes. As the following essays illustrate, Chetty’s findings have crucial lessons for federal housing programs, land use, housing mobility, and school integration. (See page 2 for a full Table of Contents)
