By that measure of course there are wealthy here. The Huntsmans being but one example.

Within mobility I think the 1% and higher are largely irrelevant. What we really want to know is whether someone in the bottom quintile can make it to the 1st or 2cd quintiles. As I mentioned with Denmark, one way to do this is just give money. But that confuses wealth somewhat with true economic mobility. There Denmark probably doesn’t do as well as Utah I suspect despite appearances.

To make that move though requires first off being able to develop the necessary skills. That’s not just education as usually used but important social skills that often the poor have a hard time developing like impulse control and contentiousness. That’s where I suspect family stability and the quality of especially discipline within families. There’s a fair bit of study suggesting that if punishment seems random it tends to lead to impulse control simply because it’s hard to judge causation by the brain. But also a lot of those skills just are hard to teach if parents can’t give enough time to the kids for whatever reason. Chaotic environments can also undermine even what good parents try to do.

I think that here Utah may for a variety of reasons do better than most states. We have less substance abuse, as mentioned more stable homes, and most importantly as the article mentions enough good stable families that form peers for those not in those environments. The peer effect is very large in setting behavior, habits and expectations.

I had a sociology professor remark once, when discussing social class, that there weren’t any upper-upper class people in Utah. It’s about more than money, but includes influence, social connections, and “old money”. Utah simply hadn’t been around long enough for the money to be that old. Now, that was a whacky professor who wasn’t backing things up with actual numbers, just trying to make a general point about social class to students in an intro. class. Still, there’s something there.