Is it easier to climb the economic ladder in red America or blue America?

In the wake of a new study on upward mobility released last week, economists and writers have been debating that question. To some — and to some readers of my article on the study — the data seemed to suggest that climbing from poverty to the middle class and beyond was harder in conservative states than in liberal ones. Looking at the map that ran in last Monday’s Times, the immediate impression is that some of the lowest rates of mobility occur in the solidly Republican Deep South:

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Yet that immediate conclusion turns out to be misleading. The odds of escaping poverty are nearly identical in liberal regions and conservative regions, at least according to this study, which some economists regard as the most comprehensive mobility analysis to date.

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The patterns make sense in light of the four factors the study cited as being strongly correlated with upward mobility rates: school quality; family structure; civic engagement, including membership in religious groups; and the size and geographic dispersion of the middle class. These factors do not strongly favor either conservative America or liberal America.

On the one hand, divorce tends to be less common in high-mobility areas, and Democratic states generally have lower divorce rates. But religious participation, another feature of high-mobility regions, is typically higher in Republican states. Standardized test scores are generally higher in Democratic states than Republican ones, but several conservative states, like Kansas, Montana and the Dakotas, have high scores, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The study also found that some of the metropolitan regions with a notably small number of middle-class households (based on the national income distribution) and a high concentration of poverty are in blue-leaning states. Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore all make that list.

Depending on the precise cut of the statistics you examine, blue America or red America may look slightly better. But the two are effectively tied. My colleague Amanda Cox and I, for instance, looked at all the metropolitan regions — or “commuting zones” — that voted for President Obama in 2012 and compared them with those that went for Mitt Romney. In Obama areas, the chance that a child born into a household in the bottom fifth of the income distribution had risen into the top fifth was 8.1 percent. In Romney areas, it was only marginally higher, 8.5 percent.

When we expanded the analysis to look at children born into the bottom fifth who had made it into one of the top two fifths, the chances were 21.1 percent for Obama areas and 22.1 percent for Romney areas.

These numbers make it clear that mobility does not appear to be more common in blue America. But it would also be a mistake to go the other way and conclude that mobility is less common. Raj Chetty, one of the four economists who conducted the study, said he and his co-authors ran the numbers multiple ways and concluded that there was effectively zero correlation between an area’s upward mobility and its political views.

It’s true that upward mobility is less common in Deep South. (In the 11 states that made up the Confederacy, the odds of jumping from the bottom fifth of the income distribution in childhood to the top fifth in adulthood were only 6.6 percent, compared with 8.9 percent in the rest of the country.)

But mobility was also notably low in Democratic-leaning Michigan and in the swing state of Ohio. As Paul Krugman noted in his column today, Atlanta and Detroit, which otherwise have little in common, both suffer from low mobility. And while the Northeast and West Coast, Democratic strongholds, have high rates of mobility, some of the highest rates are in Utah, Wyoming and the Dakotas, none of which have voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in almost 50 years.

Conservative regions and liberal regions of this country are different in many ways. On economic mobility, though, those differences largely appear to cancel each other out. There seem to be lessons for both blue America and red America in the new data.