Infographic: Economic Mobility Based On Income and Geography

Infographic creation site recently gave the Best Data Story award (Data Journalism Awards 2014) to the interactive article In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters from the New York Times. Sometimes NYT articles have such a clean layout that you don’t even notice that many of the images and graphics can be manipulated and contain additional information.

For example, in the top graphic you can hover and find the specific value for the chance that a child raised in bottom-20% household will end up in a top-20% household. 6.9% in Austin, TX by the way, where I spent a significant part of my youth.


In the next graphic, you can actually toggle the value for parental income level. In Austin, you can see how the future income distribution changes from growing up in a 10th percentile household to a 90th percentile household.




  1. Intersting. Does it say anywhere what the national averages are? I can’t find that.

    The Northwest where I live does pretty good.

  2. Would be interesting to see how this lines up with other megatrends. Two I can see potential correlation with visually are oil production/refining & income diversity spreads.

  3. An interesting statistic would be to see how much effort the person had to do to get into the next level.

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