By age 26, children from poor families who grew up in Grant County will be making $2,050 less than children who grew up in the average American county.
According to a recent study, that accounts for an eight percent negative movement in income mobility.
That report comes from a pair of economists at Harvard University, Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, and it shows income mobility on a county-by-county basis across America.
While Grant County suffers from a lack of income mobility, some neighboring counties fared even worse in the study. For example, both Delaware County and Madison County posted even lower income losses over time. Delaware County had the most negative movement with a 10 percent loss by age 26. Wells County showed the highest percentage of income mobility at 14 percent, meaning that a child from a poor family who grew up in Wells County would make $3,780 more by age 26.
Grant County Economic Growth Council President Tim Eckerle said he was skeptical of the report’s findings.
“I don’t understand the logic when you start dealing with socioeconomic phenomena. It doesn’t come down to a nice concise number,” he said. “You have a number but you don’t know what makes up that number.”
Eckerle said that in his own research and calculations, Grant County should fare better than what was indicated in the study.
“It left me with more questions than answers,” he said. “Without having the original data source, how do you know there’s any accuracy?”
The study, however, is already being used in research at Ball State University.
Michael Hicks, director of Ball State University’s Center for Business and Economic Research, said he has been following Chetty’s work for a couple of years.
“I’ve already grimaced looking at all the places I’ve lived over the years,” Hicks said. “It’s not the geography that matters. It’s the outcome of where people move to that matters. The demographics of people that live here is what’s driving the train. That’s what we’re trying to explore.”
The study found children who moved to a county with higher income mobility at early ages were less likely to become single parents and more likely to go to college, thus more likely to earn more over time.
Two important factors in income mobility, Hicks said, are teen birth rates and educational attainment.
“Without a high school diploma, you don’t have income mobility from parent to child,” he said. “There are others but it is startling how unimportant things like race tend to be. The biggest factors tend to be just simple household dynamics.”
Cathy Queen, director of Early Head Start at Carey Services, added that generational poverty often plays a large role in a child’s future income.
“Having a job for three or four months at a time is pretty normal for a lot of families in poverty in Grant County,” she said. “I think that definitely affects the children. Unfortunately, we have such a huge rate of generational poverty that it becomes normal in the family.”
As director of Early Head Start, a federally funded program for families with children under three years old and pregnant women, Queen said she has seen a desperate need for local support services for families in poverty.
“It’s a known fact that Grant County has the highest poverty rate for children in the state,” she said. “We have classrooms where we can care for children free of charge if the families qualify but we have over 80 children on our waiting list. Affordable child care is very hard to get in this area.”
Overall, the study found that Grant County is “among the worst counties in the U.S. in helping poor children up the income ladder. It ranks 301st out of 2,478 counties, better than only about 12 percent of counties.”
The data, which was broken up into poor, average-income and rich income levels, also shows that girls in Grant County have less income mobility than boys. Although boys showed a negative income mobility movement in poor families and in average-income families, girls continued to post a negative percentage in rich families, down $520 to the boys’ positive $1,290.
“The concern I have for Grant County is that if you look at what happens for poor households and rich households, everyone seems to be doing badly and especially, in this case, girls,” Hicks said. “It helps explain why Grant County is seeing outward migration. You have plenty of jobs; you just don’t have a community where households want to live.”
Queen said she has noticed the movement away from Grant County in her children’s generation.
“I definitely think location matters,” she said. “I’ve been here my whole life and I know many other people who have lived here their whole lives but our children don’t live here when they grow up because they can make much better incomes somewhere else. I think that is becoming more and more common.”
The researchers ultimately found five factors that are associated with strong upward mobility; less segregation by income and race, lower levels of income inequality, better schools, lower rates of violent crime and a larger share of two-parent households.
“There’s not some macroeconomic fix for this,” Hicks said. “It’s going to be fixed at the school level and at the community level where this is a problem.”