25% of Parental Effect Driven by Location Choice

Definitely read this article, and click on the "opportunity map" link. You can filter and see what impact the neighborhood has on earning potential, childhood pregnancy rates, incarceration rates and more. It's fascinating.

All this is based on census data. I feel like we are in a moment where demographics and neighborhoods are changing radically because of COVID and the work-from-home opportunities.

I bet the next ten years we will see radically different communities in many of these regions, especially the warm ones. Miami is seeing 58% increase in rents (https://therealdeal.com/miami/2022/04/14/miami-leads-nation-...) and what will a bunch of rich tech/finance people do to the kids in those neighborhoods?

I would be very curious to hear from people raised in the south; the opportunity map is not kind to that region. What's wrong about this information?

I wonder how much of this is outliers from special cases. Getting involved in crime, getting entangled with police violence, child abuse, getting ill from environmental conditions, all of these things can sometimes have a devastating effect, and when they do it can be really bad.

If there's nothing that unambiguously gives a strong advantage in life, you might end up with the scales weighed down heavily in terms of the impact of big bad events/influences.

And there's something to be said for that. To try to guarantee your kids an exceptional life there are so many factors out of your control you need to rely on. But preventing concrete disasters is usually something much simpler to grasp and act upon.

Separately from all of this, having loving relationships is usually a major highlight of people's lives, whether rich or not, so worth investing in that.

From the author themselves - "A major challenge with learning about parental influence is that correlation doesn’t imply causation."

Do kids do better in certain locations because of the location or because certain parents live in those neighborhoods? You'd need to control for factors which determine where parents live, then compare those same parents in different locations.

It's a weird circular argument where the conclusion is "parents have little impact", but then when you did deep, you realize the factors that do have impact are heavily influenced (if not outright decided) by the parents.

Location choice can be heavily dependent on income level. The kid who lives around the corner from Desperate High School isn't living there because Mom & Pop prefer the neighborhood to one where the houses are built around a golf course.

No paywall: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2F...

Suggesting that what neighbourhood you live in is "one decision" seems incredibly naive.