Cities that tend of have better schools for middle-income families, they tend to have much better prospects for kids moving up in the income distribution.

I would say basically the commonplace observation that kids aren't going to earn as much as their parents is now is a coin flip at this point. Are you going to do better than your parents? It's a 50-50 chance, whereas if you were born in the 1940s or 1950s, you had more than a 90 percent chance you were going to do better than your parents. So basically almost a guarantee for most kids that you were going to achieve the American Dream of doing better than your parents did. Today, that's certainly no longer the case.

Every extra year you spend in a better environment makes you more likely to go to college, less likely to have a teenage pregnancy, makes you earn more as an adult, makes you more likely to have a stable family situation, be married, for instance, when you're an adult.

It is well known that unemployment benefits raise unemployment durations.

We don’t really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes.

Atlanta's a good example of a city that's quite sprawling, where there's a sharp division between where blacks and whites live, between where low-income and high-income families live.

The data show we can do something about upward mobility. Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems to matter.