The effects of living in a poor neighborhood
A highly one-sided presentation. Let me point out some issues: it makes major hay of Moving to Opportunity, but MTO is a notorious failure - it increased crime rates in targeted areas, and showed no improvements on anything until the cited Chetty paper managed to torture out of the data, just recently, improvements in only 1 subgroup on only a handful of metrics (which, aside from Vox misstating the Chetty results by implying it was <i>all</i> MTO participants, rather than one post hoc subgroup, contradicts the later experiment: the claimed effects do not remotely overlap); non-randomized moves are heavily confounded by upward mobility and human capital; many other studies like Swedish lottery studies and the land lottery natural experiment show that exogenous shocks of wealth do not produce meaningful improvements in things like health anywhere remotely close to the observed correlations of wealth&#x2F;health; genetically informed family designs which account for heritability by looking at siblings differentially exposed or by looking at relatives tend to find that most &#x27;poor neighborhood&#x27; effects are driven by genetic confounds; specific versions of the &#x27;poor neighborhood&#x27; hypothesis tend to go down in flames when rigorously tested (most recently, the claim that schizophrenia is caused by bad neighborhoods, which everyone was <i>sure</i> about; polygenic scores for schizophrenia show that it is the other way around - schizophrenics and those vulnerable to schizophrenia drift to poor neighborhoods); in genetics studies, the correlation between wealthy parents and one&#x27;s own SES turns out to be entirely genetically mediated; the parent&#x2F;child IQ thing is differential regression to the mean; and so on. Many of the claims made in OP are naively causal and are guaranteed to be overestimated based simply on not including genetic relatedness. These are just the recent contrary studies I happen to remember offhand.<p>When you look at especially the recent genetic studies using polygenic scores from the GWASes to test environmental claims (eg Mendelian randomization), it&#x27;s becoming increasingly clear: the slate is not blank and the sociology emperor has no clothes. I don&#x27;t even know... what can be done about sociology? It is 2016 and every time I see a newspaper article or editorial invoking sociological results, it&#x27;s totally wrong, and the sociologists quoted seem 100% committed to ignoring all the contrary evidence that not all differences are 100% due to environments. I mean... can you imagine seeing Vox cite a recent paper like &quot;The Genetics of Success: How Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms Associated With Educational Attainment Relate to Life-Course Development&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pss.sagepub.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;early&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;26&#x2F;0956797616643070.abstract" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pss.sagepub.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;early&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;26&#x2F;095679761664...</a> or a newspaper article on it (which <i>didn&#x27;t</i> quote some scientists arguing that genetics research should be defunded or that the research is irrelevant)? That would be nice - society needs to come to grips with the confirmation of behavioral genetics. But it doesn&#x27;t seem like it will happen anytime soon. It&#x27;s all terribly frustrating.<p>Anyway, I didn&#x27;t mean to rant or try to write an in depth carefully cited rebuttal, but I just wanted to say: it is not as simple as &#x27;poor people are poor and unhealthy because of racism and poverty&#x27;, and there is lots of high-quality evidence of this which tends to go undiscussed in liberal media outlets, so pieces like this are closer to advocacy than research popularization.