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

Reihan Salam shows why the focus on inequality as a casual driver of economic maladies is misplaced:

In short, in our 48 largest metro areas, there is no meaningful relationship between inequality and upward mobility.

To explain the chart: There are 48 dots, one for each of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States. The numbers on the bottom, .38 to .52, measure inequality — the higher the number, the higher the inequality in a given area. The numbers on the left measure absolute mobility – the expected income percentile of a child born poor in those cities. Higher numbers mean greater upward mobility. As you can see, as inequality increases, nothing really happens. There are cities with high inequality and high mobility, low inequality and low mobility, and everything in between.