Hillbilly Elegy

including Raj Chetty, published a
groundbreaking study on opportunity in
America. Unsurprisingly, they found that
a poor kid’s chances of rising through
the ranks of America’s meritocracy were
lower than most of us wanted. By their
metrics, a lot of European countries
seemed better than America at the
American Dream. More important, they
discovered that opportunity was not
spread evenly over the whole country. In
places like Utah, Oklahoma, and
Massachusetts, the American Dream was
doing just fine—as good or better than
any other place in the world. It was in
the South, the Rust Belt, and Appalachia
where poor kids really struggled. Their