Excerpt:
Social mobility, also called upward mobility, is a defining feature of American life. Our history is filled with rags-to-riches stories—John D. Rockefeller, Oprah Winfrey, Dolly Parton, and Larry Ellison, to name a few—and millions more have reached the middle class despite challenging childhoods. The opportunity to make a better life is what attracts people from all over the world to the United States, but not all states provide the same opportunity. According to a recent report published by the Archbridge Institute, Illinois is one state that could make it easier for people to move up in society by reforming its economic policies.
The Archbridge Institute gives each state a social mobility score that is composed of data from four areas; entrepreneurship and economic growth, institutions and the rule of law, education and skills development, and social capital. Joshua Bandoch and Justin Callais, the authors of the Illinois report, note that Illinois’s social mobility score ranks 40th among the states and is the lowest in the Midwest. […]
Illinois also suffers from too much unproductive entrepreneurship. In another recent study, authors Justin Callias, Peter T. Calcagno, and Gary A. Wagner create an entrepreneurship index for 381 metropolitan areas. The index measures a metro area’s productive entrepreneurship, which is entrepreneurial activity focused on providing goods and services to consumers, and its unproductive entrepreneurship, which is entrepreneurial activity focused on lobbying government for favors such as tax breaks and regulations that harm competition. The two values are combined to create a net productive entrepreneurship (NPE) index. A metro area with a positive index value has more productive than unproductive entrepreneurship while a negative value means the opposite.
Read the full article at Forbes.
Read Illinois’ Low Social Mobility: Causes and Cures here.
Read Net Productive Entrepreneurship: An MSA-Level Index 2002-2019 here.
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