SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: NPR.
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ADRIAN MA, HOST:
Leslie Schmidt moved a lot in her childhood.
LESLIE SCHMIDT: Yeah. I can just go through the list.
DARIAN WOODS, HOST:
Let's go through it.
SCHMIDT: I was only 3 weeks old, and we moved to San Antonio, Texas. And then we moved dead in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Fort Irwin is a tough place. Well, I learned how to ride a bike. When I was 5, we went to the D.C. area. And then we moved to Fort Leavenworth, Kan. After that, we went back to San Antonio. Fantastic Tex-Mex. And then we went back to D.C. That was in Arlington, Va.
MA: Wow, the things Leslie must have seen.
WOODS: Yes, and stuff that a lot of kids don't get access to because, you know, Leslie was a military brat - you know, that lovely, affectionate term for somebody whose parents were in the armed forces. In this case, it was her dad. Her father was a military doctor.
MA: And whether you moved a lot or even if you never moved in your childhood, a question we ask ourselves sometimes is, how much do the places we grow up in affect who we are later in life economically? Like, do I earn what I earn partly because of the neighborhoods I grew up in as a kid?
WOODS: As it happens, brats are the perfect subjects in a giant natural experiment to answer this very question. This is THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY. I'm Darian Woods.
MA: And I'm Adrian Ma. Today on the show, how place affects opportunity. From the California desert to the immaculate lawns of Arlington, Va., we explore new research putting numbers on American neighborhoods. And maybe surprisingly, it's not just a matter of having wealthy neighbors.
WOODS: Because Leslie Schmidt moved around so much, she says she had her way of squeezing into new social groups.
SCHMIDT: I'm sure I was super bossy - story of my life.
MA: Leslie was sometimes living in the suburbs, sometimes on the Army base, a mix of higher and lower-income areas. All her high school years were in Arlington, Va., which has the Pentagon right there and has among the most educated population in the country.
WOODS: Because of the way the military works, when families move around like this, most of the time, it's effectively random. Historically, most military personnel have no say in where they're assigned. And this random assignment is really useful to researchers looking at social mobility.
MA: Understanding how neighborhoods affect outcomes later in life is a key public policy question. It can influence where we build public housing. It can make us rethink where education funding should go. But studying this is not as simple as looking at a leafy rich neighborhood and saying, well, those kids seem to be doing pretty well. Bruce Sacerdote is an economist at Dartmouth College.
BRUCE SACERDOTE: Is that just inevitable, and those families and those children are going to do well regardless, or is it a causal effect of the neighborhood and of the school system?
WOODS: In medicine, you test new drugs through randomized controlled trials. You have a bunch of people. You randomly give some of them the drug, and you randomly give others the placebo. And because the two groups are, on average, pretty similar, you can be more sure that any differences in outcomes are due to the drug. Something like which neighborhoods people live in, though, is much more complicated.
SACERDOTE: Who decides to move to - well, I'll call it a better neighborhood or a neighborhood that promotes mobility - that may not be random.
MA: Economists have tried creative solutions to overcome this in the past. Most famous was an experiment in 1994 called Moving to Opportunity - 4,600 families were living in public housing and impoverished areas, and roughly a third were randomly given housing vouchers that could only be used in low-poverty neighborhoods. Another third were given conventional housing vouchers that could be used anywhere. And then a control group was not given any vouchers and stayed in public housing. The results of this experiment were profound. A young child moving into a better-off neighborhood would earn 31% more later in life than a child who stayed in public housing.
WOODS: To build on this evidence, Bruce Sacerdote had an idea. Hundreds of thousands of families are already randomly scattered around the country - military families.
SACERDOTE: When people get their assignments, they're always quite surprised and usually end up in a place they never even thought about or, in some cases, had heard of.
MA: This is what social scientists call a natural experiment, when features that are kind of similar to a lab experiment are already out there in the real world. In experiments, you usually want a large sample size - the bigger, the better - so you can be less worried that your results are a fluke. And Bruce and his co-authors found a very large sample size with military brats - 760,000 children.
SACERDOTE: That's almost the minimum to really see some of these effects on earnings. Earnings tend to be very volatile and noisy, and so you need those kind of sample sizes.
WOODS: Bruce and his colleagues wanted to know how time spent in different neighborhoods at different ages affected outcomes later in their lives - things like SAT scores, whether they went to college and what their earnings were at age 25.
SACERDOTE: The impacts were even steeper than we thought. When we drill down to the ZIP code level, we find impacts that are just as large as those that earlier studies found that didn't have the advantage of this natural experiment. And what's surprising and exciting about that is that the military families are only in a given neighborhood for about 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 years. And yet you see them picking up these characteristics at a very high rate and having really meaningful impacts on children's outcomes.
MA: Those characteristics include higher SAT scores, also going to college. Imagine, hypothetically, a kid spending their entire childhood in one of these more mobile places. The results are striking.
SACERDOTE: If you were lucky enough to spend, say, 20 years in a neighborhood that had 10 percentage points higher rate of college graduates, it would boost your own college-going by something like seven percentage points. So that's quite a meaningful jump.
WOODS: That would also mean your income would, on average, go up by thousands and thousands of dollars. So imagine an income letter from 1 to 100 where 1 is no money and 100 is Jeff Bezos. Growing up in that neighborhood with more college graduates would send you six points up that ladder.
SACERDOTE: Very large impacts. And, you know, there aren't that many social programs out there that give you that kind of a boost. And, you know, we do some back of the envelopes where we think about, like, the Black-white gap in earnings that's experienced by children in the U.S., and it wipes out, like, a quarter of the gap if you're able to be in these places that promote mobility.
MA: And the kinds of places that would help social mobility were often wealthier, but not always. Thanks to previous research by economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, we know that Manhattan, for instance, scores particularly poorly, and that's in spite of having a very high median household income. Friendships across class lines are important, and also having a higher share of college graduates is an advantage for a neighborhood.
WOODS: Bruce has a few educated guesses about why some of these neighborhoods were so great for mobility - better schools, friends who study, a community of parents who expect their kids to go to college and job opportunities that kids can see every day.
MA: And certainly, this is what happened to Leslie in Arlington, Va., with her friends and family and high school.
SCHMIDT: There's so many opportunities there. And, like, that's where I did high school. I did college and law school, actually, all in Virginia.
MA: Now Leslie works in the legal field, so a lot of education and a great job.
WOODS: Of course, Leslie's personal grit and determination would have also been critical. Also, growing up with a doctor for a dad has to have raised expectations for her. But in terms of the locations she went to, well, Bruce's paper shows that her early years in Fort Irwin in California might have actually been a disadvantage.
SCHMIDT: Fort Irwin is a tough place for kids in high school 'cause the high school is, like, an hour away by bus. But as a little kid, it was awesome.
MA: Thankfully, Bruce's paper found high school years are the most important for college-going and earnings. Those high school years in hypereducated Arlington were a boost for Leslie. Leslie, by the way, still loves moving around. And for any young brats out there right now moving a lot, she's got some advice.
SCHMIDT: Just try to keep being yourself. I felt like every time I was at a new school, I had an opportunity to put on to be a new person, but, you know, I always ended up just being the kind of bookish bossy girl that I am.
WOODS: (Laughter) You can take the bossy Leslie out of the state, but you can't take the bossy Leslie out of herself.
SCHMIDT: Exactly (laughter).
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WOODS: You know what, Adrian? I hear it's brat summer.
MA: Hell yeah.
WOODS: (Laughter) Convincing, Adrian. I know you're a big Charli XCX fan.
(LAUGHTER)
WOODS: This episode was produced by Julia Ritchey with engineering by Cena Loffredo. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Concannon edits the show, and THE INDICATOR is a production of NPR.
Three-six-five party girl, Adrian Ma.
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