TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

In a thought-provoking piece, Reihan Salam argues that focusing on the link between mobility and inequality can elide a much deeper story:

Yet these U.S. metropolitan areas (Seattle, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh) have much higher Gini coefficients than Denmark and Norway. By way of comparison, the Gini coefficient (0 is perfect equality, 1 is perfect inequality) for the U.S. is .467, it is .248 for Denmark and .250 for Norway. Seattle has a Gini coefficient of .439, Salt Lake City has a Gini coefficient of .417, and Pittsburgh has a Gini coefficient of .459. If there is a tight association between inequality and mobility, how is it that Seattle and Salt Lake City and Pittsburgh are roughly matching the upward mobility performance of Denmark and Norway with levels of inequality that are subtantially higher? Again, this doesn’t mean that inequality is irrelevant. But if Pittsburgh (.459) and Denmark (.248) are in roughly the same ballpark, it seems that we ought to pay close attention to what Pittsburgh and cities like it are getting right.

Salam emphasizes that while that link is real, we should also focus on a city’s level of integration, which helps to explain the disconnect he explains above. Read it.