Karen Duffin
speaker
53 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Karen Duffin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But in the end, about 4,600 families were part of it. And in 1994, the moving began. We were not able to talk to the families that moved, but NPR's Morning Edition did cover the study while it was happening. Stevenskeep spoke to a mother named Shirley Hudnall who had moved with her 15-year-old son, Brian. She talked to him about some of the things that do make these kinds of moves hard.
For four years, across the five test cities, people like Shirley moved, and the researchers waited. And in 2008, the researchers finished gathering the data, and what it told them surprised them.
For one thing, moving was better for girls than for boys.
Parents reported better health, something HUD hadn't even originally planned to measure, improved mental health and physical health.
All of which, of course, is wonderful, but this is not what the experiment was designed to test. What they wanted to test was the, quote, long-term housing employment and educational achievements of families involved.
And this massive, scientifically designed and rigorously tested social experiment that had moved thousands of people, just to answer the question, can changing someone's address change the course of their economic life? The answer to that question was no.
Basically, no impact on educational outcomes, employment, or income. If you want to improve those things, the final report said, housing is not your answer. Housing is just housing. And with that, all of the hopes and dollars and research and programs that had been going towards this idea about housing, a lot of that just got rerouted to other ideas. But then this thing happened.
About four years after that final sad MTO data came out, another researcher badged into his government cubicle, this time on the 10th floor of the IRS headquarters in D.C., And like Mark, he wanted to understand how to improve people's economic lives.
This is Nathan Hendren. He's an economist from Harvard. And for a few years, he and some of his research pals had been granted access to tax records at the IRS, with all kinds of privacy restrictions, of course.
Having that much data allows them to be so much more precise.
Nathan is trying to understand the impact of tax policies on upward mobility, which is economists speak for, can you achieve the American dream? Can a child go from the bottom income bracket to, over time, the top income bracket? And this is an issue that has become increasingly urgent.
Right now, the data says that you are twice as likely to be able to achieve the American dream in Europe, or at least a lot of countries in Europe. So Nathan is looking at tax records from across the country, and he does start seeing a pattern. A pattern that surprised him. That huge MTO study. It looked like it had missed something. Something enormous.
After the break, the experiment that changed everything has to change. Okay, so Nathan Hendren was knee-deep in all of this income tax data at the IRS. alongside his researcher pal Raj Chetty.
They'd seen this data that showed a pattern. People who are rising from the bottom income bracket to the top income bracket aren't just randomly scattered across the country. They're clustered. And your chances of escaping poverty vary widely depending on which cluster you're in. So Nathan digs in deeper. He's starting to look at families who moved into higher mobility neighborhoods.
Like, let's say you have two kids and you move them to this better neighborhood and one of your kids is four when you move and the other one is eight.
Where you live matters for whether you have a shot at achieving the American dream, which sounds terribly obvious. But that contradicts what Moving to Opportunity found, that huge HUD study.
Nathan starts to map income tax data from the actual MTO participants. And this more precise MTO data confirms the pattern that they saw nationally. In fact, the data is so strong that they can say the new neighborhood actually caused the person's economic improvements. That's how much a change of address mattered.
But they also start to realize that it really only mattered for a subset of the MTO participants, only for kids who were younger than 13 years old when they moved. And this explains why HUD missed this outcome. Nathan was looking at the data in 2014. HUD had last looked at this data six years before that, in 2008.
Those younger kids had now grown up, started earning money, started producing income tax data, and they were finally grown up enough now for the data to reveal itself. And what the data was saying was that housing had been hope. Even though they had spent 14 years on this study, they had just counted it out too early.
It's so crazy how just by happenstance, kind of, you guys were studying this at a moment where you could actually see that.
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