Employment Guide: Economic study ranks Pittsburgh high for upward mobility

American society has a preoccupation with rankings and superlatives.

Titles like “most likely to succeed” are honors often bestowed upon graduating seniors. In the post-high school world, publications and experts constantly come up with rankings of the universities most likely to give graduates a leg up, careers that offer the highest earnings and industries that are growing the fastest.

Those who grow up in or near Pittsburgh are among the most likely to succeed in the United States, according to a study released earlier this month by economists at the University of California-Berkeley and Harvard University.

In an exhaustive survey of tax records, the economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard and Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley divided the United States into “commuting zones” based around major cities. Within each zone, they compared the income of about 10 million people born from 1980 to 1982 with the same people’s incomes in 2011 and 2012. 

The researchers then ranked the 50 largest zones in the survey according to how many of the children from families in the lowest 20 percent of incomes in the early 1980s were earning incomes in the top 20 percent in 2011 and 2012.

Based on these measurements, Pittsburgh, with 9.5 percent of children moving from families in the bottom 20 percent to the top 20 percent, was the second most successful city in the United States — behind only Salt Lake City — in terms of economic mobility in the United States with 10.8 percent. 

Southern cities fared the worst among those surveyed in terms of people successfully rising from families with low incomes to becoming top earners. Atlanta, Raleigh, N.C., and Charlotte, N.C., fell to the bottom, with 5 percent, 4.5 percent and 4.4 percent, respectively.

James Kenkel, an associate professor of economics at Pitt, was impressed by the researchers’ paper. 

“What they did, the amount of work, is incredible,” Kenkel said.

But Kenkel said drawing conclusions about where to live based on the information would be taking things too far.

He pointed out that the study only based its ranking on the cities where families lived in the late 1990s and did not examine whether children lived in the same city when the researchers measured their incomes in 2011 and 2012.

He said this was not enough information to tell whether there was any real variation in upward mobility between cities or if the variations were only because of random events.

“It could be that there’s more opportunity in Pittsburgh, but there’s no way to tell,” Kenkel said.

The researchers themselves admitted in the report that they could not offer an explanation for why some regions fared better than others, but described it as a “snapshot of intergenerational mobility” for those born between 1980 and 1982. The people born between these years were used as a sample, to compare their success later in life with their parents’ success. 

The researchers also stressed in their report that their findings have not been peer-reviewed for publication in a journal.

Although Kenkel said the researchers’ data about different regions was not conclusive, he did discover one of the researchers’ findings interesting: There is a great deal of variation between parents’ and their children’s incomes.

Nationwide, 7.5 percent of children from families in the bottom 20 percent of income earners wound up in the top 20 percent of earners later in life, according to the study.

Out of those born into families in the top 20 percent, 10.9 percent of children wound up with incomes in the bottom 20 percent when they were about 30, according to the study.

Kenkel said this finding contradicts conventional wisdom.

“Everybody has this impression that if your parents are really, really rich, then you’re going to be really, really rich,” he said. “But this [data are] saying that’s not always true.”

Meanwhile, the researchers wrote that there was a great deal of variation between different areas within the same commuting zone, although the researchers did not go into detail about which areas within Pittsburgh and other cities had the most variation between generations. According to the study, commuting zones are defined as geographical aggregations of counties that are similar to metropolitan areas, but cover the entire United States, including rural areas.

Whether or not Pittsburgh has more opportunities than the average U.S. city, poor areas of Pittsburgh tend to remain poor between generations.

One of the most impoverished of such neighborhoods is Homewood, where, according to a 2011 study by researchers at Pitt’s University Center for Urban and Social Research, about 48 percent of households lived on less than $15,000 a year. 

In 2011, the federal poverty level for a household of only two people was set at $14,710.

But the fastest route to improvements in poor areas like Homewood might be through community organizations. The researchers found that areas in which more residents participated in community or religious groups tended to show more upward mobility.

Dina “Free” Blackwell is vice president of organizational development for the Homewood Renaissance Association, a community group she said formed in 2012 to address the lower high school graduation and employment rates in the neighborhood.

Blackwell said Homewood Renaissance tries to break the cycle of poverty that limits opportunities for successive generations in an area. The faith-based group runs a program to teach the STEM disciplines to middle school-aged children from Homewood and other struggling communities. Operating through donations — most notably a $2 million dollar donation from Dollar Bank — the organization is able to pay certified teachers as part of its STEM program.

“With hard work, change can occur, and we are seeing it,” Blackwell said in an email. “Many of these young people need an opportunity that will help them break the cycle and reach beyond what they know.”