It goes virtually without saying that the role of government in dealing with poverty is one of the biggest debates in the U.S. right now. This article takes a look at Utah, which is the state with the highest degree of upward mobility in the nation, despite having really low government intervention.

My takeaways:

1. It benefits greatly from effective bureaucracy. One of my frustrations with conservative attacks on government institutions is that they generally refuse to consider the possibility of fixing things rather than dismantling them (and this is without getting into the fact that many of the problems were often created by conservative politicians with the specific purpose of sabotage).

2. But culture is also a great factor. The Mormon Church does a huge amount of outreach and services to the poor, and seeks to get people back to work without creating the kind of long-term dependence on government benefits that becomes an almost generational thing. But more than that, the underlying culture matters: when more people are married, children do better. When more people have jobs, it becomes an aberration not to have one, so there's more incentive to do so (and more help from people who already have jobs, both in terms of financial support and connections).

3. We on the left need to be a little more skeptical about blaming everything on racism.