What military brats tell us about social mobility

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Children of U.S. military families, a.k.a. brats, are known for their adaptability when relocating to new neighborhoods and schools every few years. This migratory population became the basis for brand new research on how the neighborhood you grew up in affects your economic success later in life. Today on the show, how a place influences your financial destiny.

Related episodes:
Chasing the American Dream at Outback Steakhouse (Apple / Spotify)
The secret to upward mobility: Friends

For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	NPR. Leslie Schmidt moved a lot in her childhood.
0:15.0	Yeah, I can just go through the list.
0:17.0	Let's go through it.
0:18.0	I was only three weeks old and we moved to San Antonio, Texas.
0:21.0	And then we moved dead in the middle of the Mojave desert.
0:22.8	Fort Irwin is a tough place.
0:23.8	Well, I learned how to ride a bike.
0:24.8	When I was five, we went to the DC area.
0:26.9	And then we moved to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
0:29.2	I went to that we went back to San Antonio.
0:31.2	Fantastic Tex-Mex. And then we went back to D.C.
0:34.0	I was in Arlington, Virginia.
0:35.0	Wow, the things Leslie must have seen.
0:37.0	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
0:44.4	affectionate term for somebody whose parents were in the armed forces in this case it was
0:49.3	her dad her father was a military doctor and whether whether you moved a lot, or even if you never moved in your childhood,
0:57.0	a question we ask ourselves sometimes is,
0:59.5	how much do the places we grow up in
1:01.5	affect who we are later in life economically.
1:05.2	Like do I earn what I earn partly because of the neighborhoods I grew up in as a kid.
1:11.0	As it happens, Brats are the perfect subjects in a giant natural experiment to answer this very question.
1:18.0	This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darren Woods.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.