In Washington Monthly, Nationhood Lab’s director outlines the findings of Nationhood Lab’s recent analysis of the interlocking geographies of intergenerational mobility, household debt and creditworthiness.
For Washington Monthly, Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard wrote about Nationhood Lab’s recent work on the regional geography of opportunity and economic distress. The piece was also published at Real Clear Policy.
The online piece summarized the results of two recent analytical projects, one focused on the implications of Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s work on intergenerational economic mobility, the other tapping on county-level data on household creditworthiness, debt, and lack of health insurance. Both used the lens of the U.S. regional cultures identified in the American Nations model and showed centuries-old settlement patterns have left a mark. Regional cultures inclined to invest in public goods performed better than those that strive for a low tax, low service environment with weak regulations.
“The best-performing region is New Netherland, the Dutch-colonized area around what is now New York City, which was, from the 1640s onward, a society of ‘self-made men’ and later spawned the ‘American Dream’ narrative in American life,” Woodard wrote. “Regions that were slave-centered societies until the mid-1860s and had formal racial caste systems until the mid-1960s have the worst social mobility.”
The work examines the effects of the regional differences using the historically-based regional model first described in Woodard’s 2011 history, American Nations, that is based on First Settler effects and the geography of colonization. Woodard has previously used the model to examine the 2024, 2020, 2016, and 2012 presidential contests, the 2022, 2018, and 2014 midterms, and key off-year contests in 2013 and 2011, as well as a wide range of social, health, historical and policy phenomena in American life. It is summarized for an academic audience in this peer-reviewed journal article.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center, examines regional issues in American life and has developed a revised civic national story for the 21st century United States tied to the ideals in the Declaration.