Where Are the Best Places in the Country for Economic Mobility?

The measures of intergenerational economic mobility,calculated below by the St. Louis Fed, are computed by concentrating on the group of people born in 1980-82. The family income of these persons in 2011-12 (when they were between 29 and 32 years old) was compared with the income of their parents in 1996-2000 (when they were between 14 and 20 years old). The figure below shows average economic mobility in each Fed district and the standard deviation (in percentage points) of the mobility indicator across counties within each district, weighted by population.

The figure shows large differences in mobility across the 12 districts. The Minneapolis District had the highest average mobility across districts. This is true even when excluding North Dakota and South Dakota, where some boom towns recorded extremely high mobility rates. (Doing so reduced mobility to 10.8 percent from 11.9 percent and the standard deviation to 3.2 percentage points from 4.8 percentage points.)

The San Francisco, New York, Boston and Dallas districts exhibited mobility rates above the national average of 8.2 percent, while also showing low dispersion of mobility rates across their counties. In contrast, within the group of districts with above-average mobility, the Kansas City District has the third-largest mobility rate but the second-highest dispersion after Minneapolis, while Philadelphia has the seventh-largest mobility rate but low dispersion.

 The Chicago, Cleveland, Richmond, St. Louis and Atlanta districts displayed lower levels of mobility, substantially below the 8.2 percent national average. Furthermore, the Chicago, Cleveland, Richmond and St. Louis districts had the highest dispersion-to-mean ratios among all districts (excluding Minneapolis and Kansas City), which implies that they contained counties with extremely low mobility.