Where you raise your kids really matters

Remember my post on how much driving sucks? It actually sucks even more than I realized.

I found a little tid I am honestly a bit too delighted to share while finally reading Raj Chetty et al.’s 2014 absolute banger Where Is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States.

Chetty and his merry team of Harvard economists found that the fraction of working parents whose commute is shorter than 15 minutes is “the proxy that has the strongest and most robust univariate correlation with upward mobility in each category.”

In other words, if you want your kids to have a better life than you’re having, live within 15 minutes of your job.

Satisfying and vindicating for me personally as this fact may be, it’s probs not the most important takeaway from this paper. This paper points to a few really important realities for US parents.