How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive • Hacker News Board

Re: How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive

#41

Post by gragas » Sun, Apr 02, 2017, 3:04 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #24

greeneggs wrote: post #5

> For a girl raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Salt Lake City is a very weird place. I went to Utah precisely because it’s weird. More specifically, because economic data suggest that modest Salt Lake City, population 192,672, does something that the rest of us seem to be struggling with: It helps people move upward from poverty. By this criterion, should Salt Lake City be so weird to a New Yorker? Upward M…

Conjecture: the number one driver of a city's upward mobility is fraction of foreign-born population. Poor foreigners move to US with few skills, and then their children do fine. Note that this mechanism has nothing to do with the differences between social services in different cities. Let's check: Out of the 50 largest cities, here are where those high-mobility cities rank by percentage foreign-born. 3. San Jose 38…

Your conjecture says nothing about the people already living there.

When you only take people who meet the H1-B requirements, of course it is the case that the percentage of foreign-born people is strongly correlated with upward mobility; all of the foreigners move upwards.

Re: How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive

#42

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 02, 2017, 3:05 PM UTC

itchyjunk wrote: post #15

When I was first about to move to Utah, few years ago, lot of people asked me "why?" and told me a lot about a lot of things. Of course, I didn't even know who the Mormons were (I am not from USA originally). Most of what I heard was wrong. I've met Mormons who have asked me where I am from and not only know where that country is but spoke to me in my NATIVE tougue. I was very impressed. The key word in the article i…

[deleted]

Re: How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive

#43

Post by arconis987 » Sun, Apr 02, 2017, 3:05 PM UTC

itchyjunk wrote: post #15

When I was first about to move to Utah, few years ago, lot of people asked me "why?" and told me a lot about a lot of things. Of course, I didn't even know who the Mormons were (I am not from USA originally). Most of what I heard was wrong. I've met Mormons who have asked me where I am from and not only know where that country is but spoke to me in my NATIVE tougue. I was very impressed. The key word in the article i…

I grew up Mormon in Utah and I love the Mormons in my life. Every leader in local congregations is an unpaid volunteer. Everyone in the congregation has a responsibility to carry out in the community (sunday school teacher, youth mentor, clerk to track finances, etc). As a Mormon kid, I was taught to work hard my whole life for the good of others. I served a Mormon mission in Europe, which was an extremely difficult experience, but I learned the value of persistence and diligent hard work.

There are definitely some interesting positive cultural influences from the Mormon church. There are some negative influences however. A few years ago, I decided no longer to participate in the Mormon church because of its harsh policies/teachings about LGBT people and because I found myself agreeing with agnostic atheism. I told my family and friends that I'd always respect them and their beliefs when I decided to leave the church. I was surprised by the harsh reaction: my Mormon loved ones told me that they were concerned about the future of my children, that I was depriving my family of happiness in heaven, and, as one of my own parents told me, they didn't know who I was anymore.

I think Mormons are extremely kind to non-members of the church and to the church's current members. But if you are a member and you want to leave, sometimes they can be extremely harsh. I also think Mormons are some of the most kind people in the world on the person-to-person scale, but on the group-to-group scale, they can be pretty brutal sometimes. Blacks were denied access to the most sacred temple rituals until 1978, and today LGBT people in long-term relationships or marriages are considered apostates and their children are not allowed to be baptized. Weird mix of super kind and super harsh.

Re: How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive

#44

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 02, 2017, 3:06 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #24

greeneggs wrote: post #5

> For a girl raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Salt Lake City is a very weird place. I went to Utah precisely because it’s weird. More specifically, because economic data suggest that modest Salt Lake City, population 192,672, does something that the rest of us seem to be struggling with: It helps people move upward from poverty. By this criterion, should Salt Lake City be so weird to a New Yorker? Upward M…

Conjecture: the number one driver of a city's upward mobility is fraction of foreign-born population. Poor foreigners move to US with few skills, and then their children do fine. Note that this mechanism has nothing to do with the differences between social services in different cities. Let's check: Out of the 50 largest cities, here are where those high-mobility cities rank by percentage foreign-born. 3. San Jose 38…

[deleted]

Re: How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive

#45

Post by philipodonnell » Sun, Apr 02, 2017, 3:10 PM UTC

supremesaboteur wrote: post #25

"Utah is a deep red state, but its conservatism is notably compassionate" Or maybe conservatives are not ruthless towards the poor ?

In general, conservatives tend to regard poverty as a self-inflicted state, or at least that remaining in poverty is a failing of the individual by not escaping it, and thus addressing poverty should be left to that individual.

Liberals think of poverty more as a systematic social condition that individuals bear little responsibility for, either getting there or remaining there, and thus addressing poverty should be undertaken by formal social support systems.

It's not ruthless as much as different views of why poverty exists and how to address it, and like many issues, not all conservatives hold 100% conservative views. It's common to refer to conservatives who have a more liberal view of poverty as "compassionate", but it's just a word, not a judgement.

Re: How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive

#46

Post by skywhopper » Sun, Apr 02, 2017, 3:10 PM UTC

These sorts of comparisons inevitably don't mean much because there's just too many factors that are different between Utah and the states the author compares them to. It helps upward mobility if you start out better off, and Utah has the the fifth richest bottom quintile in the nation (See http://scorecard.assetsandopportunity.org/latest/measure/sta...) in a place where household expenses and housing costs are probably lower than three or four of the states with a higher bar for being "bottom quintile". It also helps if you don't have entrenched poor communities, and are extremely culturally homogenous (meaning that those with power and money are far more likely to identify with and support the bottom quartile of people since they mostly share the same cultural and religious identity). In other words, Utah is so different than the counterexample states that making facile comparisons of "education spending per pupil" and concluding that "big government is not the solution" is a ridiculous argument to make.

Re: How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive

#47

Post by jessriedel » Sun, Apr 02, 2017, 3:12 PM UTC

gragas wrote: post #41

jessriedel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conjecture: the number one driver of a city's upward mobility is fraction of foreign-born population. Poor foreigners move to US with few skills, and then their children do fine. Note that this mechanism has nothing to do with the differences between social services in different cities. Let's check: Out of the 50 largest cities, here are where those high-mobility cities rank by percentage foreign-born. 3. San Jose 38…

Your conjecture says nothing about the people already living there. When you only take people who meet the H1-B requirements, of course it is the case that the percentage of foreign-born people is strongly correlated with upward mobility; all of the foreigners move upwards.

The whole point of my comment is that looking at raw mobility data doesn't tell you much about social service effectiveness because raw mobility is dominated by immigration effects.

Re: How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive

#48

Post by thedevil » Sun, Apr 02, 2017, 3:15 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #35

thedevil wrote: post #31

I'm from Utah. I moved to Seattle, then San Francisco. When I had a kid, I moved back to Utah. One thing I noticed is that Utah is almost all middle class. Some have more money, some have less, but most of them are middle class. It's relatively easy to go from poor to rich if you're really middle class. I mean that if your parents are well educated but a high school teacher and a stay-at-home-mom in a middle class ne…

> If you can lift up people in situations like that, I'd be much more impressed. > But I think the lack of a real lower and upper class would make mobility look artificially better. I'm a bit confused. Aren't these contradictory? By not having poverty haven't they achieved the raising people out of poverty bit already?

I'm not sure that achieving a solution is the same as avoiding a problem. And it's not clear to me which has happened.

Re: How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive

#49

Post by hughdbrown » Sun, Apr 02, 2017, 3:16 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #24

greeneggs wrote: post #5

> For a girl raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Salt Lake City is a very weird place. I went to Utah precisely because it’s weird. More specifically, because economic data suggest that modest Salt Lake City, population 192,672, does something that the rest of us seem to be struggling with: It helps people move upward from poverty. By this criterion, should Salt Lake City be so weird to a New Yorker? Upward M…

Conjecture: the number one driver of a city's upward mobility is fraction of foreign-born population. Poor foreigners move to US with few skills, and then their children do fine. Note that this mechanism has nothing to do with the differences between social services in different cities. Let's check: Out of the 50 largest cities, here are where those high-mobility cities rank by percentage foreign-born. 3. San Jose 38…

The Spearman rank correlation of your two sets is 61% (after dropping cities that are not common to both).

https://gist.github.com/hughdbrown/94016d0f477b855a893514131...

Sadly, Salt Lake City is dropped from the set because of the missing foreign-born data.

Re: How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive

#50

Post by skywhopper » Sun, Apr 02, 2017, 3:17 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #35

thedevil wrote: post #31

I'm from Utah. I moved to Seattle, then San Francisco. When I had a kid, I moved back to Utah. One thing I noticed is that Utah is almost all middle class. Some have more money, some have less, but most of them are middle class. It's relatively easy to go from poor to rich if you're really middle class. I mean that if your parents are well educated but a high school teacher and a stay-at-home-mom in a middle class ne…

> If you can lift up people in situations like that, I'd be much more impressed. > But I think the lack of a real lower and upper class would make mobility look artificially better. I'm a bit confused. Aren't these contradictory? By not having poverty haven't they achieved the raising people out of poverty bit already?

The thing is, Utah has never had a truly poor population. They aren't raising people out of poverty, but it's growing fast and most of the people who move there are relatively rich compared to the general population.

But also, Utah has the fifth richest bottom quartile of any state, about 40% higher than North Carolina's. So yes, it's much much easier to move from that to the top quartile than in most states.