Which Thinkers Will Define Our Future?: Live at Project Syndicate

Over at Project Syndicate: Which Thinkers Will Define Our Future?: BERKELEY – Several years ago, it occurred to me that social scientists today are all standing on the shoulders of giants like Niccolo Machiavelli, John Locke, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim.

One thing they all have in common is that their primary focus was on the social, political, and economic makeup of the Western European world between 1450 and 1900. Which is to say, they provide an intellectual toolkit for looking at, say, the Western world of 1840, but not necessarily the Western world of 2016. What will be taught in the social theory courses of, say, 2070? What canon – written today or still forthcoming – will those who end their careers in the 2070s wish that they had used when they started them in the late 2010s? Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

Agriculture the Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race?: Today’s Economic History

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Consider Jared Diamond’s 1987 paean to hunter gatherers. While I find his article provocative and insightful, I also find it annoying. It seems to me that it mostly misses the most important parts of the story.

For one thing, it misses the importance of the dominant Malthusian mechanisms. The invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals provide an enormous technological boost to humanity both in terms of the number of calories that can be harvested by an hour of work and in terms of the ability of a society to make durable investments of all kinds that further boost its productivity. It is an absolute living-standard bonanza for the generations that discover it, and the generations that come after.

So what goes wrong with quality of life among agriculturalists? Well, without rapid technological progress and before the demographic transition, human populations and living standards tend to settle at a point where, given nutrients, hazards of life, and societal institutions, every mother has on average one daughter who herself reproduces. The standard of living will be whatever standard of living makes that happen. And, for agriculturalists–without the hazards to adults of travel and hunting, and without the hazards a mobile lifestyle imposes on the very young–that standard of living is a lot lower than among hunter-gatherers. Lifespan looks about the same looking across hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. Biomedical and fitness indicators are much much higher for hunter-gatherers.

Whether this is a “disaster” or not depends on the answer to the old utilitarian conundrum of whether it is better to have a few people who live very well or a lot of people who live very poorly. This is an open question in philosophy, but Diamond appears to think that it is a closed one. And Diamond ignores the important consideration that only the density of population that comes with agriculture can generate enough human brains thinking to allow us to–quite possibly–transcend our Malthusian limits and create a truly human world in the long run.

As to inequality … violence … domination … In my view it is difficult to say on net. Certainly the agricultural epoch has many many more people reaping where they did not sow and gathering where they did not scatter. Nevertheless, taking all three together, I cannot judge whether there was either a positive or a negative change across the boundary of the Neolithic Revolution. More inequality and domination, certainly. But you also have many more interactions between humans that are not one-shot interactions: people have fixed addresses, after all. If we know anything about humans, it is that human males have a tendency to resort to violence–perhaps not as great a tendency as chimps or gorillas, but a tendency, and we make more deadly weapons. It is not at all clear to me that the hunter-gatherer epoch had less murder, rape, kidnapping and enslavement of women, and so forth than did the agricultural epoch.

The hunter-gatherer age was not a kumbaya-singing age. Where, after all, are the Neanderthals today?

Jared Diamond (1987): The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race: Discover (May), pp. 64-66: “Archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress…

…The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence…. For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It’s a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short…. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it’s nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive…. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?…. The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art…. Agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass….

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients…. The lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren’t nasty and brutish, even though farmers have pushed them into some of the world’s worst real estate…. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps….

Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions…. keletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’9″ for men, 5’5″ for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’3″ for men, 5′ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors…. Burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys… a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150…. These early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. ‘Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years,’ says Armelagos, ‘but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive.’ The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. ‘I don’t think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity,’ says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. ‘When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it’s become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate.’

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health… a varied diet… [vs] one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition…. Because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together… led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease….

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the elite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease…. Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts — with consequent drains on their health….

Thus with the advent of agriculture and elite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls. One answer boils down to the adage ‘Might makes right.’ Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.)… As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution… outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter….

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture’s glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us?


Diamond is broadly right in what he says:

Carles Boix and Frances Rosenbluth: Bones of Contention: The Political Economy of Height Inequalty: “Human osteological data provide a rich, unmined source of information…

…about the distribution of nutrition, and by extension, the distribution of political power and economic wealth, in societies of long ago. On the basis of data we have collected and analyzed, we find that the shift from a hunter–gatherer to a labor-intensive agriculture opened up inequalities that had discernible effects on human health and stature. But we also find that political institutions intervene decisively in affecting the distribution of resources within societies. Political institutions appear to be shaped not only by economic factors but also by military technology and vulnerability to invasion, leaving important questions for additional exploration.

Must-Read: Carles Boix and Frances Rosenbluth: Bones of Contention: The Political Economy of Height Inequality

Must-Read: Carles Boix and Frances Rosenbluth: Bones of Contention: The Political Economy of Height Inequality: “Human osteological data provide a rich, unmined source of information…

…about the distribution of nutrition, and by extension, the distribution of political power and economic wealth, in societies of long ago. On the basis of data we have collected and analyzed, we find that the shift from a hunter–gatherer to a labor-intensive agriculture opened up inequalities that had discernible effects on human health and stature. But we also find that political institutions intervene decisively in affecting the distribution of resources within societies. Political institutions appear to be shaped not only by economic factors but also by military technology and vulnerability to invasion, leaving important questions for additional exploration.

Must-Read: Heather Boushey: Investing in Early Childhood Education Is Good for Children and Good for the Economy

Must-Read: Ross Douthat’s citations here are to journalist Joe Klein’s 2011 unprofessional trashing of Head Start and Republican Tennessee political Kevin Huffman, plus Baker, Gruber, and Milligan (2008) and Lipsey, Farran, and Hofer (2015). These are not the four citations that anybody would choose who is not actively attempting to misrepresent the state of knowledge about early childhood education programs.

This is one of the many, many things that makes me think that the New York Times does not have a long-run future. Its only possible edge is to develop a reputation as a disinterested information intermediary as the legacy position it had gained as a result of its role as central place for upper-class New York print ads ebbs. Things like this make developing such a reputation materially harder.

Smart New York Times executives would kill the op-ed page and give its budget and its newshole to David Leonhardt to fill, and then back off and let him do his thing. But these are the executives who let Nate Silver walk at least in part because of the political staff. As Nate said:

This guy Jim Rutenberg…. Jim Rutenberg and I were colleagues at the New York Times in 2012 when 538 was part of the New York Times. They were incredibly hostile and incredibly unhelpful to 538, particularly when 538 tried to do things that blended reporting with kind of more classic techniques of data journalism…. When we went to New Hampshire… the New York Times political desk is literally giving us the cold shoulder like it’s some high school lunchroom…. We filed the story pointing out… that Rick Santorum had probably won the Iowa Caucus, a story that involved a combination of data work and reporting…. They were apoplectic because their Romney sources were upset…. A story that… got things totally right pissed them off because they didn’t get the scoop and it went against what their sources wanted…

But the executives aren’t that smart…

Heather Boushey protests about the lack of journalistic quality control here:

Heather Boushey: Investing in Early Childhood Education Is Good for Children and Good for the Economy: “Ross Douthat used his New York Times column to express frustration that hoping for a “substantive debate about domestic policy” in this presidential election year is “delusional”…

…He imagines a scene from a future debate between… Hillary Clinton and… Donald Trump… over the benefits of early childhood education. Douthat even added several hyperlinks… links that alas fall short on revealing where the evidence actually stands today….

Randomized control trials that follow children from pre-school through adulthood… children who participate… do better in school, are more likely to attend and graduate college, and are less likely to smoke, use drugs, be on welfare, or become teenage mothers… the Carolina Abecedarian Study… the Milwaukee Project… Project STAR… Raj Chetty and his co-authors find that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes at age 27, such as college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. Like in the Perry Preschool/High Scope study, in Project STAR, researchers found that while the cognitive effects on test scores fade as a child ages, the non-cognitive effects did not. Of course, not every study found such results… the Early Training Project….

Overall, though, the evidence points to the conclusion that investing in early childhood is important for future outcomes both for the children themselves and our economy more generally. If columnists provide hyperlinks to real-life academic studies to buttress fantasy debates between the two presidential candidates, they should at least point to the best studies available. In this case, the preponderance of evidence shows that early childhood education works for the children, their families, and the broader U.S. economy.

Must-Read: Kostadis J. Papaioannou: “Hunger Makes a Thief of Any Man”: Poverty and Crime in British Colonial Asia

Must-Read: Kostadis J. Papaioannou: “Hunger Makes a Thief of Any Man”: Poverty and Crime in British Colonial Asia: “Extreme rainfall, both droughts and floods, lead to a large increase in property crimes (such as robbery, petty theft and cattle raiding)…

…but not to an increase in interpersonal violent crimes (such as murder, homicides and assault)…. We offer evidence that loss of agricultural income is one of the main causal channels leading to property crime. Additional historical information on food shortages, poverty and crime is used to explore the connection in greater detail…

Must-Read: Eric Loomis: Jobs for Those Who Lack College Degrees

Must-Read: Perhaps I have fallen down on the job. Perhaps I have not EconomistSplained enough to the very sharp Eric Loomis that the Education Fraction does not believe that everybody ought to get a college education. The Education Fraction, rather, believes that the demand for college-educated workers is relatively inelastic, so that small increases in the relative numbers of college-educated workers will produce large decreases in the college wage premium and large increases in the wages of high school-educated workers. They–we–may be right and we may be wrong. But it’s not that we completely ignores the fact that some people are simply not cut out for a college education. Rather, we believe in supply and inelastic labor demand…

Eric Loomis: Jobs for Those Who Lack College Degrees: “As I have stated many times here…

…the United States has to create dignified work for people who can’t or haven’t earned a college degree. It’s simply terrible policy to blithely claim that education will solve our problems because it completely ignores the fact that some people are simply not cut out for a college education. And that needs to be OK…

What can the state see? Or, the extraordinary power of the night-watchman state

Hoisted from 2010: James Scott, “Legibility,” Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Robin of Locksley, Rebecca Daughter of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others..: Cato Unbound: James Scott: The Trouble with the View from Above.: A comment:

In 542 AD the late Roman (early Byzantine?) Emperor Justinian I wrote to his Praetorian Prefect concerning the army–trained and equipped and paid for by the Roman State to control the barbarians and to ‘increase the state.’ Justinian was, Peter Sarris reports in his Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian, upset that:

certain individuals had been daring to draw away soldiers and foederati from their duties, occupying such troops entirely with their own private business…. The emperor… prohibit[ed] such individuals from drawing to themselves or diverting troops… having them in their household… on their property or estates…. [A]ny individual who, after thirty days, continues to employ soldiers to meet his private needs and does not return them to their units will face confiscation of property… ‘and those soldiers and fioderati who remain in paramonar attendance upon them… will not only be deprived of their rank, but also undergo punishments up to and including capital punishment.’

Justinian is worried because what is going on in the country he rules is not legible to him. Soldiers–soldiers whom he has trained, equipped, and paid for–have been hired away from their frontier duties by the great landlords of the Empire and employed on their estates and in the areas they dominate as bully-boys. One such great landlord was Justinian’s own sometime Praefectus Praetorio per Orientem Flavius Apion, to whom one of Flavius’s tenants and debtors, one Anoup, wrote:

No injustice or wickedness has ever attached to the glorious household of my kind lord, but it is ever full of mercy and overflowing to supply the needs of others. On account of this I, the wretched slave of my good lord, wish to bring it to your lordship’s knowledge by this present entreaty for mercy that I serve my kind lord as my fathers and forefathers did before me and pay the taxes every year. And by the will of God… my cattle died, and I borrowed the not inconsiderable amount of 15 solidi…. Yet when I approached my kind lord and asked for pity in my straits, those belonging to my lord refused to do my lord’s bidding. For unless your pity extends to me, my lord, I cannot stay on my ktema and fulfill my services with regard to the properties of the estate. But I beseech and urge your lordship to command that mercy be shown to me because of the disaster that has overtaken me…

The late Roman Empire as Justinian wished it to be would consist of (a) slaves, (b) free Roman citizens (some of whom owned a lot of land), (c) soldiers, (d) bureaucrats, and (e) an emperor. The slaves would work for their masters. Slaves along with their citizen masters and non-slaveholding citizens would farm the empire (some of the citizens owning their land; some renting it). All would be prosperous and pay their taxes. And the emperor would use the taxes to pay the soldiers who dealt with the Persians, the Huns, the Goths, and the Vandals; to fund the building of Hagia Sophia and other works of architecture in Constantinople; and to promote the true faith and extirpate heresy. If the countryside were legible to him, that is how things would be–slaves and citizens in their places, landlords and tenants in their mutually-beneficial contractual relationships, all prosperous and all paying their taxes to support the empire.

But Justinian knows very well that the countryside is not legible to him. The contracts that Flavius Apion makes with his tenants are made under the shadow of the threat that if Flavius Apion does not like the way things are going he will send a bucellarius to beat you up. Anoup is not pointing out to Flavius Apion that their landlord-tenant relationship is a good thing and that keeping him as a tenant rather than throwing him off the land for failure to pay the rent is in both their interests. Instead, Anoup is calling himself a slave (which he is not). Anoup is calling Flavius Apion a lord (which he is not supposed to be). Anoup is appealing to a long family history of dependence of himself and his ancestors on the various Flavii Apionoi and Flavii Strategioi of past generations. Justinian thinks that things would be better served if the countryside were properly legible to him and he could enforce reality to correspond to the legal order of slaves and citizens, tenants and landlords interacting through contract, and taxpayers. Flavius Apion would prefer that the order be one of proto-feudalism: that all the Anoups know and understand that they are at his mercy, and that the emperor is far, far away. And we don’t know what Anoup thinks. We do know thait does not sound as though he experiences the lack of legibility of the countryside to the emperor and his state as a full and complete liberation. And we do know that the Emperor Justinian was gravely concerned about the transformation of his soldiers into bucellarii, into the dependent bully-boys of the landlords–both because it meant that they were not on the borders where they belonged and because it disturbed what he saw as the proper balance of power in the countryside and what he saw as the emperor’s justice.

Justinian’s big (and to him insoluble) problem was that the Flavius Apion whose bully-boys beat up his tenants when they displeased was the same Flavius Apion who headed Justinian’s own bureaucracy.

Thus when James Scott speaks of how local knowledge and local arrangements having the ability to protect the people of civil society from an overmighty, blundering state, I say ‘perhaps’ and I say ‘sometimes.’

It is certainly the case that the fact that Sherwood Forest is illegible to the Sheriff of Nottingham allows Robin of Locksley and Maid Marian to survive. But that is just a stopgap. In the final reel of Ivanhoe the fair Rebecca must be rescued from the unworthy rogue Templar Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert (and packed offstage to marry some young banker or rabbi), the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne must receive their comeuppance, the proper property order of Nottinghamshire must be restored, and Wilfred must marry the fair Rowena–and all this is accomplished by making Sherwood Forest and Nottinghamshire legible to the true king, Richard I ‘Lionheart’ Plantagenet, and then through his justice and good lordship.

A state that makes civil society legible to itself cannot protect us from its own fits of ideological terror, or even clumsy thumb-fingeredness. A state to which civil society is illegible cannot help curb roving bandits or local notables. And neither type of state has proved terribly effective at constraining its own functionaries.

In some ways, the ‘night watchman’ state–the state that enables civil society to develop and function without distortions imposed by roving bandits, local notables, and its own functionaries, but that also is content to simply sit back and watch civil society–is the most powerful and unlikely state of all.

Must-read: Manu Saadia: “Robots could be a big problem for the third world”

Must-Read: Manu Saadia: Robots could be a big problem for the third world: “If manufacturing is reduced to the status of agriculture, a highly rationalized activity…

…(read: employing very few people) [then] the historically proven path to economic growth and prosperity taken by Korea and China might no longer be available to the next countries. This is what keeps many economists up at night. The rise of the robots will probably reduce economic opportunities for emerging nations…. Countries you rarely hear about today, say Uganda and Tanzania, are projected to have two hundred million and three hundred million inhabitants respectively by the end of the century. What is going to happen to these people if there are no opportunities for work and wages because the manufacturing of goods has become a trivial, automated low-returns business? Not all of them will find jobs at Starbucks, regardless of how big their cities are.

It turns out that the reinvention of work imagined by Star Trek and all the social adjustments that come with it are not just some kind of pleasant philosophical exercise for overfed upper-class Western consumers of entertainment. In a world where machines produce most of the goods at a marginal cost, a just and adequate distribution of resources is a matter of life or death for billions of people yet to be born. Developed countries will or will not enact redistributive policies in the face of growing automation. The responses are well known, from progressive taxation to universal health insurance, and access to education to unconditional cash transfers, or so-called basic income. We possess stable institutions and the wealth to settle these matters adequately. Less developed countries do not yet. We are racing toward pervasive automation faster than they are catching up.

Must-read: Suresh Naidu and Noam Yuchtman: “Labor Market Institutions in the Gilded Age”

Must-Read: Suresh Naidu and Noam Yuchtman: Labor Market Institutions in the Gilded Age: “Although 19th century labor markets were unencumbered by regulatory legislation…

…there existed frictions and rents… [that] played an active role in determining labor market outcomes and the distribution of income…. When firms experienced positive output price shocks, their employees earned wage premia…. The existence of rents in the labor contract suggests a role for bargaining and conflict between employees and employers. Workers in the late 19th century
attempted to strike to increase their wages; we present data on the frequency of strikes in the 19th century as well as some evidence suggesting that strikes were correlated with workers’ wages. Employers were supported by institutions of their own: we describe the important role played by the U.S. government in limiting the efficacy of union strikes in the 19th century…. We present new evidence documenting the rise of judicial injunctions that ended strikes, pointing to the important role played by the judicial branch of the U.S. government in structuring (Northern) American labor market institutions prior to the rise of legislative regulation.

Must-read: Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren: “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility: Childhood Exposure Effects and County-Level Estimates”

Must-Read: Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren: The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility: Childhood Exposure Effects and County-Level Estimates: “Studying more than five million families who move across counties in the U.S….

…we present quasi-experimental evidence that neighborhoods affect intergenerational mobility through childhood exposure fects. In particular, the outcomes of children whose families move to a better neighborhood – as measured by the outcomes of children already living there – improve linearly in proportion to the time they spend growing up in that area. We distinguish the causal effects of neighborhoods from confounding factors by… outcomes of siblings… moves triggered by displacement shocks, and… sharp variation in predicted place effects across birth cohorts, genders, and quantiles. We also document analogous childhood exposure effects for college attendance, teenage birth rates, and marriage rates….

For children growing up in families at the 25th percentile of the income distribution, each year of childhood exposure to a one standard deviation (SD) better county increases income in adulthood by 0.5%. Hence, growing up in a one SD better county from birth increases a child’s income by approximately 10%. Low-income children are most likely to succeed in counties that have less concentrated poverty, less income inequality, better schools, a larger share of two-parent families, and lower crime rates. Boys’ outcomes vary more across areas than girls, and boys have especially poor outcomes in highly-segregated areas. In urban areas, better areas have higher house prices, but our analysis uncovers significant variation in neighborhood quality even conditional on prices.