We're number two!!!

It's amazing, but somehow understandable. What the New York Times reported yesterday is shocking, if for no other reason than we are quite definitely fly-over country here, part of the great unwashed and unreachable and rarely mentioned or distinguishable for anything, save for the fact that there are more humanoids of Dutch extraction per square mile here than anywhere in America and probably, given our plentiful animals, leaders in offal. Otherwise, who really cares, right?

Well, it turns out--I'm not making this up--that two researchers at Harvard, Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, economists who've been powerhouses in their field, have crunched the numbers on a particularly interesting study of America's poor and America's counties, only to discover that Sioux County, Iowa, where I've lived for forty years, is the second best place to live (more precisely, to move to) if you're a kid and you're poor--at least in opportunity. We offer a better path upward than more than 3000 other counties in the land of free and home of the brave.

For other reasons other places may be better places to live if you're a kid from a poor family; but if you're economically disadvantaged little boy or little girl and you want not to continue to live in your family's financial woes, then you really should talk your parent(s) into making camp right here because what the new study shows powerfully is that neighborhoods reallly, really matter.

Sioux County is second out 3000+ counties in the U. S. of A., at offering opportunity, and we should be shouting that fact from the mountain tops (hill tops maybe), not because the study commends our compassion or broadly mandated welfare, but because it means exactly what it says--here, Sioux County, Iowa, if you're a poor kid moving in you stand just about the nation's best chance of relieving the poverty in which you're living.

It doesn't mean that wages are sky high here, as everyone knows. What's behind the amazing findings is salient factors that align themselves to create greater opportunity: a child in Sioux County has a better chance of growing up in a two-parent family, of receiving a good education, of earning more than his or her parents than he or she does almost anywhere in America.

And it's nearly as true in the neighboring counties, who trail Sioux quite insubstantially. The fact of the matter is Siouxland is pretty darn good place to grow up if you're poor. That's what Chetty and Hendren's new study makes evident.

And that goes a long, long ways toward explaining why it is that this county votes so overwhelmingly Republican. The factors which unite to offer an escape from poverty here have little to do with an the government and everything to do with the way we live, with the culture of the neighborhood. It's not the availability of food stamps that make Sioux County a good place to live for poor people; it's the region's strong marriages, it's quality education, and the necessary wages to live a comfortable life here--maybe not in Marin County, but here.

I'll have more to say tomorrow. But I'm proud--I really am--of being from a place so mightily distinguished. Seriously, things work in Sioux County, Iowa--our marriages, our schools, our jobs, our communities. They do because we do. And that's a marvelously good thing.

And all of us who live here in the region should be proud.

More tomorrow.