A lot of research shows that people's social, economic and other opportunities are generally pretty anchored to where they physically are.

Judge as of 2022-03-24. True: a substantial body of peer-reviewed research (for example, Chetty et al. on opportunity and geography, research on spatial mismatch, and studies of local social networks) shows that people's economic and social opportunities depend strongly on where they live. Mostly true: the research supports a strong link for economic opportunity, with somewhat thinner but consistent evidence for social opportunity. Mixed: the evidence supports the link for one domain but is inconclusive for the other. Mostly false: the research shows only a weak or narrow association, which the claim generalises into a broad rule. False: research shows that location has little bearing on opportunity.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States Quarterly Journal of Economics (Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez) · November 2014

   “Although our descriptive analysis does not identify the causal mechanisms that determine upward mobility, the publicly available statistics on intergenerational mobility developed here can facilitate research on such mechanisms.”

2. E2 The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment National Bureau of Economic Research (Working Paper 21156; later American Economic Review 2016) · May 2015

   “We find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood significantly improves college attendance rates and earnings for children who were young (below age 13) when their families moved.”

3. E3 Re-assessing the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies · 23 April 2025

   “We conclude that geographic proximity to good jobs is unlikely to be a major source of the racial earnings gaps in major U.S. cities today.”

E2 is a randomized Moving to Opportunity study. It found that moving to a lower-poverty neighbourhood significantly raised college attendance and earnings for children who moved before age 13, which is causal support for a link between place and economic opportunity. E1's quoted passage only says the analysis is descriptive and does not identify causal mechanisms, so it adds little. None of the evidence covers social opportunity, such as local social networks, so that part of the claim is unsettled. E3 dates from 2025, after the judgment date, and covers only racial earnings gaps, so it was not weighed. Causal support for the economic domain from E2, with nothing conclusive on the social domain, fits the 'mixed' criterion.