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Leslie Schmidt moved a lot in her childhood. Yeah. I can just go through the list. Let's go through it.
Leslie Schmidt童年时搬了很多次家。是的。我可以列出清单。我们来看看吧。
I was only 3 weeks old, and we moved to San Antonio, Texas. And then we moved dead in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Fort Irwin is a tough place. Well, I learned how to ride a bike.
我出生三周后，我们搬到了得克萨斯州的圣安东尼奥。然后我们搬到了莫哈维沙漠的中部。欧文堡是个艰苦的地方。我学会了骑自行车。
When I was 5, we went to the D.C. area. And then we moved to Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
我5岁时，我们去了华盛顿特区。然后我们搬到了堪萨斯州的莱文沃思堡。
After that, we went back to San Antonio. Fantastic Tex-Mex. And then we went back to D.C. That was in Arlington, Va.
之后，我们回到了圣安东尼奥。得州的墨西哥菜很美味。然后我们回到了华盛顿特区。然后是弗吉尼亚州的阿灵顿。
Wow, the things Leslie must have seen.
哇，Leslie一定见过很多东西。
Yes, and stuff that a lot of kids don't get access to because, you know, Leslie was a military brat - you know, that lovely, affectionate term for somebody whose parents were in the armed forces.
是的，很多孩子都看不到这些东西，因为Leslie是个军人子弟（military brat是对父母在军队的孩子的一种可爱、亲切的称呼）。
In this case, it was her dad. Her father was a military doctor.
她的父亲是一名军医。
And whether you moved a lot or even if you never moved in your childhood, a question we ask ourselves sometimes is,
无论是否经常搬家，甚至在童年时期从未搬家，我们有时会问自己一个问题：
how much do the places we grow up in affect who we are later in life economically? Like, do I earn what I earn partly because of the neighborhoods I grew up in as a kid?
我们成长的地方对我们以后的经济状况有多大影响？比如，我挣到的钱是否部分取决于我小时候长大的社区？
As it happens, brats are the perfect subjects in a giant natural experiment to answer this very question. This is THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY. I'm Darian Woods.
其实在这场大型自然实验中，孩子们才是回答这个问题的完美对象。这里是THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY。我是Darian Woods。
And I'm Adrian Ma. Today on the show, how place affects opportunity.
我是Adrian Ma。今天的节目谈论地点对机会的影响。
From the California desert to the immaculate lawns of Arlington, Va., we explore new research putting numbers on American neighborhoods.
从加州沙漠到弗吉尼亚州阿灵顿整洁的草坪，我们进行了新的研究，这些研究将数据统计应用于美国社区。
And maybe surprisingly, it's not just a matter of having wealthy neighbors.
也许令人惊讶的是，这不仅仅是有富裕邻居的问题。
Because Leslie Schmidt moved around so much, she says she had her way of squeezing into new social groups. I'm sure I was super bossy - story of my life.
因为Leslie Schmidt经常搬家，她说她有办法融入新的社交群体。我敢肯定我是个超级霸道的人，这就是我的人生故事。
Leslie was sometimes living in the suburbs, sometimes on the Army base, a mix of higher and lower-income areas.
Leslie有时住在郊区，有时住在军事基地，那里既有高收入地区，也有低收入地区。
All her high school years were in Arlington, Va., which has the Pentagon right there and has among the most educated population in the country.
她高中时期都在弗吉尼亚州阿灵顿度过，五角大楼就在那里，人口受教育程度也是全美最高。
Because of the way the military works, when families move around like this, most of the time, it's effectively random. Historically, most military personnel have no say in where they're assigned.
由于军队的运作方式，家庭像这样四处迁移时，大多数时候都是随机的。古往今来，大多数军人对自己的分配没有发言权。
And this random assignment is really useful to researchers looking at social mobility.
这种随机分配对研究社会流动性的研究人员非常有用。
Understanding how neighborhoods affect outcomes later in life is a key public policy question.
了解社区如何影响晚年生活是一个关键的公共政策问题。
It can influence where we build public housing. It can make us rethink where education funding should go.
它可以影响我们在哪里建造公共住房，可以让我们重新思考教育资金应该流向何处。
But studying this is not as simple as looking at a leafy rich neighborhood and saying, well, those kids seem to be doing pretty well. Bruce Sacerdote is an economist at Dartmouth College.
但研究这个问题并不像看着一个绿树成荫的富裕社区说“好吧，那些孩子似乎过得很好”那么简单。布鲁斯·萨塞尔多特（Bruce Sacerdote）是达特茅斯学院的经济学家。
Is that just inevitable, and those families and those children are going to do well regardless, or is it a causal effect of the neighborhood and of the school system?
这些家庭以及孩子无论如何都会过得很好，这是难免的吗？还是说与社区和学校系统有关？
In medicine, you test new drugs through randomized controlled trials. You have a bunch of people. You randomly give some of them the drug, and you randomly give others the placebo.
医学上通过随机对照试验测试新药。你有一群人，随机给其中一些人服用药物，随机给其他人服用无效对照剂。
And because the two groups are, on average, pretty similar, you can be more sure that any differences in outcomes are due to the drug.
由于这两组人平均而言非常相似，因此可以更确定结果的任何差异都是药物造成的。
Something like which neighborhoods people live in, though, is much more complicated.
然而，人们住在哪个社区之类的事情要复杂得多。
Who decides to move to - well, I'll call it a better neighborhood or a neighborhood that promotes mobility - that may not be random.
谁决定搬到更好的社区或促进流动性的社区可能不是随机的。
Economists have tried creative solutions to overcome this in the past. Most famous was an experiment in 1994 called Moving to Opportunity -
经济学家过去曾尝试过创造性的解决方案来解决这个问题。最著名的是1994年的一项名为“搬向机遇”的实验——
4,600 families were living in public housing and impoverished areas, and roughly a third were randomly given housing vouchers that could only be used in low-poverty neighborhoods.
4600个家庭住在公共住房和贫困地区，大约三分之一的家庭被随机授予只能在低贫困社区使用的住房券。
Another third were given conventional housing vouchers that could be used anywhere. And then a control group was not given any vouchers and stayed in public housing.
另外三分之一的人获得了可以在任何地方使用的传统住房券。剩下的三分之一对照组没有获得任何住房券，而是住在公共住房里。
The results of this experiment were profound. A young child moving into a better-off neighborhood would earn 31% more later in life than a child who stayed in public housing.
这项实验的结果意义深远。搬到富裕社区的小孩成年后的收入将比住在公共住房里的孩子高出31%。
To build on this evidence, Bruce Sacerdote had an idea. Hundreds of thousands of families are already randomly scattered around the country - military families.
为了有说服性，布鲁斯·萨塞尔多特想出了一个主意。成千上万的家庭已经随机分散在全国各地。
When people get their assignments, they're always quite surprised and usually end up in a place they never even thought about or, in some cases, had heard of.
当人们得到分配时，他们总是非常惊讶，通常会被分配到一个从未想过的地方，或是从未听说过的地方。
This is what social scientists call a natural experiment, when features that are kind of similar to a lab experiment are already out there in the real world.
这就是社会科学家所说的自然实验，让被试处于与实验室实验有相似特征的日常环境中。
In experiments, you usually want a large sample size - the bigger, the better - so you can be less worried that your results are a fluke.
自然通常需要一个大的样本量，越大越好，这样就不会那么担心结果是侥幸。
And Bruce and his co-authors found a very large sample size with military brats - 760,000 children.
布鲁斯和他的合著者发现，军人子女的样本量非常大，有76万名儿童。
That's almost the minimum to really see some of these effects on earnings. Earnings tend to be very volatile and noisy, and so you need those kind of sample sizes.
军人子女收入往往非常不稳定，且生活环境嘈杂，所以需要这种样本量。
Bruce and his colleagues wanted to know how time spent in different neighborhoods at different ages affected outcomes later in their lives - things like SAT scores, whether they went to college and what their earnings were at age 25.
布鲁斯及其同事想知道，在不同年龄阶段，在不同社区生活的时间对他们以后的生活有什么影响，比如SAT成绩、是否上过大学以及25岁时的收入。
The impacts were even steeper than we thought. When we drill down to the ZIP code level, we find impacts that are just as large as those that earlier studies found that didn't have the advantage of this natural experiment.
影响甚至比我们想象的还要大。当我们深入研究邮政编码级别时，我们发现影响与早期研究发现的影响一样大，而早期研究没有利用这个自然实验的优势。
And what's surprising and exciting about that is that the military families are only in a given neighborhood for about 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 years.
令人惊讶和兴奋的是，军人家庭只在一个特定的社区生活了大约2年半到3年半。
And yet you see them picking up these characteristics at a very high rate and having really meaningful impacts on children's outcomes.
然而，你会看到他们快速掌握了社区的特征，并对孩子的结果产生了有意义的影响。
Those characteristics include higher SAT scores, also going to college. Imagine, hypothetically, a kid spending their entire childhood in one of these more mobile places. The results are striking.
这些特征包括更高的SAT成绩，也包括上大学。想象一下，假设一个孩子在这些流动性更强的地方度过整个童年。结果出人意料。
If you were lucky enough to spend, say, 20 years in a neighborhood that had 10 percentage points higher rate of college graduates, it would boost your own college-going by something like seven percentage points. So that's quite a meaningful jump.
如果你足够幸运，在一个大学毕业生比例高出10个百分点的社区里生活了20年，那么你的大学入学率就会提高7个百分点左右。所以这是一个相当有意义的飞跃。
That would also mean your income would, on average, go up by thousands and thousands of dollars. So imagine an income letter from 1 to 100 where 1 is no money and 100 is Jeff Bezos.
这也意味着收入平均会增加数千美元。想象一下从1到100的收入证明，其中1表示没有钱，100代表杰夫·贝索斯。
Growing up in that neighborhood with more college graduates would send you six points up that ladder.
在有更多大学毕业生的社区长大，收入会上升6个百分点。
Very large impacts. And, you know, there aren't that many social programs out there that give you that kind of a boost.
影响非常大。没有那么多社会项目能给你这样的提升。
And, you know, we do some back of the envelopes where we think about, like, the Black-white gap in earnings that's experienced by children in the U.S., and it wipes out, like, a quarter of the gap if you're able to be in these places that promote mobility.
我们做了一些调查，比如美国儿童的收入差距，如果你能生活在这些促进流动性的地方，那么差距就会缩小四分之一。
And the kinds of places that would help social mobility were often wealthier, but not always.
那些有助于社会流动的地方往往比较富裕，但并非总是如此。
Thanks to previous research by economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, we know that Manhattan, for instance, scores particularly poorly, and that's in spite of having a very high median household income.
得益于经济学家哈吉·柴提和Nathaniel Hendren之前的研究，我们知道曼哈顿的得分特别低，尽管其家庭收入中位数很高。
Friendships across class lines are important, and also having a higher share of college graduates is an advantage for a neighborhood.
跨阶级的友谊很重要，而且拥有更高比例的大学毕业生对社区来说也是一个优势。
Bruce has a few educated guesses about why some of these neighborhoods were so great for mobility - better schools, friends who study, a community of parents who expect their kids to go to college and job opportunities that kids can see every day.
布鲁斯对为什么其中一些社区如此有利于流动有一些有根据的猜测，比如更好的学校、学习的朋友、父母希望孩子上大学的社区以及孩子们每天都能看到的工作机会。
And certainly, this is what happened to Leslie in Arlington, Va., with her friends and family and high school.
当然，这就是弗吉尼亚州阿灵顿的Leslie及其朋友、家人和高中的经历。
There's so many opportunities there. And, like, that's where I did high school. I did college and law school, actually, all in Virginia.
阿灵顿有很多机会。而且，我就是在那里读高中的。实际上，我在弗吉尼亚州上了大学，读了法学院。
Now Leslie works in the legal field, so a lot of education and a great job.
现在Leslie在法律领域工作，受过很多教育，工作也很好。
Of course, Leslie's personal grit and determination would have also been critical. Also, growing up with a doctor for a dad has to have raised expectations for her.
当然，Leslie的个人勇气和决心也至关重要。此外，在父亲是医生的环境中长大，人们对她的期望也随之提高。
But in terms of the locations she went to, well, Bruce's paper shows that her early years in Fort Irwin in California might have actually been a disadvantage.
但就她去过的地方而言，布鲁斯的论文表明，她早年在加利福尼亚州欧文堡的生活实际上可能是一个劣势。
Fort Irwin is a tough place for kids in high school 'cause the high school is, like, an hour away by bus. But as a little kid, it was awesome.
欧文堡对高中生来说是一个艰苦的地方，因为距离学校大约有一个小时的公交车车程。但对小孩子来说，那里很棒。
Thankfully, Bruce's paper found high school years are the most important for college-going and earnings. Those high school years in hypereducated Arlington were a boost for Leslie.
值得庆幸的是，布鲁斯的论文发现高中时期对上大学和赚钱来说是最重要的。在教育水平很高的阿灵顿度过的高中时光对Leslie来说是一个激励。
Leslie, by the way, still loves moving around. And for any young brats out there right now moving a lot, she's got some advice.
顺便说一句，Leslie仍然喜欢四处走动。对于现在经常四处走动的年轻人，她有一些建议。
Just try to keep being yourself. I felt like every time I was at a new school, I had an opportunity to put on to be a new person, but, you know, I always ended up just being the kind of bookish bossy girl that I am.
试着做你自己就好。我觉得每次我去一所新学校，我都有机会成为一个新的人，但最终我总是成为那种书生气十足的专横女孩。
You can take the bossy Leslie out of the state, but you can't take the bossy Leslie out of herself. Exactly.
你可以让专横的Leslie离开那个州，但你不能让专横的Leslie离开自己。正是如此。
You know what, Adrian? I hear it's brat summer. Hell yeah. Convincing, Adrian. I know you're a big Charli XCX fan.
Adrian，我听说现在是夏天。当然。很有说服力，Adrian。我知道你是查莉·XCX的忠实粉丝。
