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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

"The people who study this stuff seriously end up concluding that cultural and domestic factors are the biggest predictor."

Wasn't there a Harvard study that concluded the biggest factor was a 2 parent household?

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> Of all the factors most predictive of economic mobility in America, one factor clearly stands out in their study: family structure. By their reckoning, when it comes to mobility, “the strongest and most robust predictor is the fraction of children with single parents.” They find that children raised in communities with high percentages of single mothers are significantly less likely to experience absolute and relative mobility. Moreover, “[c]hildren of married parents also have higher rates of upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer single parents.” In other words, as the figure below indicates, it looks like a married village is more likely to raise the economic prospects of a poor child.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/01/new-harvard-study-w... (Slate: What’s the most important factor blocking social mobility? Single parents, suggests a new study.)

https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/129/4/1553/1853754 ("Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States")

Of course, this has been known for very long. Moynihan was getting in trouble for saying it back in the 60s. It's also the reason why the Civil Rights Act includes women; a particularly angry racist congressman from Virginia added women to the bill (which was widely understood to be aimed at strengthening black fathers to keep families together) to get the whole thing killed (though some publications have argued that Smith was the Baptist rather than the bootlegger in the group that got women added to the bill). The bill was still destroyed by it, if not in the way originally pictured, since it passed.

>a particularly angry racist congressman from Virginia added women to the bill

Where do I read more about this?

The congressman you're looking for is Howard W. Smith. I'll let you pick a preferred source.

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