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Future earnings as an adult can be predicted by the city a child grows up in.
This chart shows the ‘place effects’ of select cities. Each amount is the ‘bonus’ or ‘penalty’ a city gives annually to the future earnings of children in low-income families (25th percentile).
The conclusions on this map are only valid if everything else is equal in all the locations. And obviously they aren’t equal. All the cities with high Black populations got bad scores. Is it just a coincidence that all these cities have an “earning penalty”? Or is it more likely these numbers merely reflect the socioeconomics of the population, not the opportunities each city actually has? It seems ludicrous to conclude that the same child growing up in any of these cites would be affected by these numbers compared with the particular situation of each child.
The conclusions on this map are only valid if everything else is equal in all the locations. And obviously they aren’t equal. All the cities with high Black populations got bad scores. Is it just a coincidence that all these cities have an “earning penalty”? Or is it more likely these numbers merely reflect the socioeconomics of the population, not the opportunities each city actually has? It seems ludicrous to conclude that the same child growing up in any of these cites would be affected by these numbers compared with the particular situation of each child.