01 — Research Journey
Why this question, and why now?
This is the story behind the project — the chain of reasoning that connects a single question to thirty countries, a dozen datasets, and a policy simulator.
The Question
Does where you are born determine your economic future? It is simple to ask and extraordinarily hard to answer. This project tries — visually, interactively, honestly.
Income Inequality
Inequality is the distance between the top and the bottom. The Gini index compresses that distance into a single number — but behind every point on the curve are real families.
Education
Education is the single most powerful predictor of upward mobility. Countries that educate children equally — regardless of their parents’ income — see more movement up the ladder.
Health & Wellbeing
A health shock can erase a decade of progress. Universal healthcare is not just a welfare policy; it is a mobility policy.
Housing & Place
Where a child grows up — the neighbourhood, the school district, the air quality — shapes their odds of climbing. Place is destiny, until policy intervenes.
What This Project Argues
Not that hard work is irrelevant — but that hard work alone is not enough. The structure of opportunity matters. And structure is something we choose, through policy.
The Great Gatsby Curve
More unequal societies are less mobile
Each dot is a country. Horizontal is inequality (Gini); vertical is social mobility. The pattern slopes downward — the relationship that economist Alan Krueger named the Great Gatsby Curve.
Hover any dot to see the country. The downward slope is the curve.
Now explore the evidence yourself.
The Research Journey sets the frame. The rest of the lab lets you interrogate the data.
Open the Mobility Explorer