Here’s a deceptively simple factoid that should change the way we think about achieving the American Dream of economic opportunity in Hawaii:

The neighborhood you grew up in is by far the most important predictor of your future economic success.

Sounds commonsensical, especially in Hawaii where we talk about our neighborhoods all the time.

It’s not. In fact, what we commonly call a neighborhood in Hawaii turns out to be misleading.

This new neighborhood emphasis is a whole new way of thinking because a neighborhood is not what you think it is, and neighborhoods affect people in powerful but kind of mysterious ways.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

This according to the economist Raj Chetty’s amazingly clever, path-breaking research that uses data covering many years following thousands of people from childhood to adulthood in every census tract in the United States.

With the help of Chetty’s well-funded institute, eight major cities are using these discoveries to develop new policies. In Seattle, for example, “navigators” with local housing authorities are helping steer poor people searching for housing toward higher opportunity neighborhoods.

Honolulu should use Chetty’s research, too.

What’s a neighborhood? Well, it’s not how people in Honolulu generally describe them:

“I live Ewa Beach.”

“She’s a Waianae girl.

“He’s a Kahala boy.”

Why It Matters If Your Neighbor Has A Job

The neighborhoods that Chetty found so influential are much smaller and harder to identify. Think of a typical map of Ewa Beach as a broad, flat portrait. A Chetty map of that place would be a jig-saw puzzle.

While immediate surroundings have a large effect on a child’s future, the traits of a neighborhood just a mile away from where the child grew up have almost no effect.

What’s more, these mini-neighborhoods may be close to one another and very similar by conventional indicators yet very different from one another in profound ways that affect a person’s long-term economic success. The size of these mini-neighborhoods vary depending on the density of the neighborhood, but two to three blocks is a decent estimate.

Wait, there’s more. Within this social mobility mix there are many “opportunity bargain” neighborhoods that are affordable and yet have very high levels of upward mobility.

So, as Chetty puts it, you need to consider neighborhoods at a very granular level — grains of sand as opposed to Oahu neighborhood board boundaries.

Here’s is where it gets more significant, interesting and enigmatic. These small neighborhood effects can’t be explained by the usual standard economic indicators like the labor market or typical social indicators like the family.

Nope. The key is some sort of neighborhood gestalt. The effects of a neighborhood appear to be greater than the sum of its parts.

For instance, what is more important than whether your father has a job is whether your neighbors have jobs. The influence of a working neighbor? That’s part of the uncertainty right now though, given the very likely importance of informal social networks, this neighbor influence may have to do with the informal role modeling that goes on.

Actually, as Chetty is the first to admit, these good or bad influences are subtle and remain hard to pin down. He and others are working on it.

His best guess, supported by other research, is that social networks have a lot to do with these differences.

All those possibilities, all that variation, so few generalities. Sophisticated, targeted policy approach or analytical and political nightmare?

Actually, a bit of both. The strength of this new approach is that it involves the opposite of one-size-fits-all. That also creates extremely weighty challenges.

Think of the way researchers used to approach cancer as compared to how they do now. It used to be cancer singular, as in “the war on cancer.” There were relatively few protocols to treat the disease.

This resulted in low cure rates, chemo protocols that worked on some patients but did not on others who appeared to have the same disease.

Now, thanks to genetic testing and a wider variety of treatments, cancer treatment has become individualized — and consequently more complicated.

It requires new kinds of diagnostic and treatment artistry and flexibility because there are more possibilities.

What is more important than whether your father has a job is whether your neighbors have jobs.

Chetty’s approach resembles this new oncology and requires the same artistry, persistence and imagination.

It creates the need for a whole crapload of diverse interventions, not Kaneohe versus Ewa Beach or Kalihi and Kaimuki, but differences within those two places.

A war on poverty and the fight to achieve the American Dream becomes instead many skirmishes with varying tactics with the understanding that grand strategy does more harm than good.

Using Chetty’s information and adopting his approach are tall orders for Hawaii’s policy makers. But it is clearly worth the effort if we really want to create a place where children have a greater chance to become better off than their parents.

The Weight Of Neighborhood History

The biggest challenge, though, for the U.S. as a whole and for Hawaii, is the power of history — those longstanding forces that have profoundly affected poverty and social mobility.

On the mainland that means the 300-plus years legacy of racism.

Chetty’s map of the swath of low opportunity states precisely matches a map of the Confederacy.

Areas of a city that suffered from the federal government’s racially discriminating lending policies are the same ones that have the most problems today.

In Hawaii, these legacies include colonialism and cultural destruction, combined with historical economic forces that have made living here so unaffordable for so many.

Can the sophisticated but small-scale interventions emerging from Chetty’s insights overcome these forces?

“Overcome” is too high a standard. There really are no sweeping answers or grand theories that we can rely on. And our disastrous national politics nonsense makes things even worse.

Chetty’s approach is the only hope for change right now.

And the fact that it is trying to carve out a space for change against large and stubborn crippling forces like racism and the legacy of cultural destruction?

Well, that’s the world we’ve lived in since slaves came to America in 1619 and outsiders settled in Hawaii a little less than 200 years after that.

Do what we can, yes? The new approach to mobility and opportunity indicates that we can still do a lot.