The American dream and the South: Atlanta mayor defends his city, blames Civil War

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed responded on Wednesday to a study that suggested poor children born in the southern U.S. had reduced access to significantly higher earnings in the future.

"If you look at the study, many of its conclusions would be true about the entire South, and have their roots in issues that date all the way back to the Civil War," Reed told Atlanta's WABE.?

The study, conducted by Harvard and University of California economists, says that children born into poor families living in the southern U.S. -- and the southeast, specifically -- will have a much more difficult time entering the upper class as compared with their cohorts born elsewhere. Children born into poor families in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles were found to have a 10 percent chance of making it into the upper class, while poor children born in Birmingham had a 5.5 percent chance, for example.?

Children born in Atlanta were found to have a 4 percent chance at making it into the upper class, prompting Reed's defense of his own city.

"Show me another city in the South in a Southern state that has been more successful than the city of Atlanta," Reed said, instead attributing the disadvantage to regional characteristics.?

Source: http://blog.al.com/wire/2013/07/the_american_dream_and_the_sou.html

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