With Hope Street Group's Economic Opportunity Index (EOI) Americans can now quantify exactly how opportunity is growing or shrinking in the United States by gender, racial/ethnic group, or state, helping to identify what will matter most in ensuring equality of opportunity in the future. more

With Hope Street Group's Economic Opportunity Index (EOI) Americans can now quantify exactly how opportunity is growing or shrinking in the United States by gender, racial/ethnic group, or state, helping to identify what will matter most in ensuring equality of opportunity in the future. The Index is a weighted combination of indicators that have been shown to affect economic opportunity, defined by Hope Street Group as “expected lifetime real income,” covering broad areas from regulatory policy to health and social safety nets, with varying values over time and across different segments of the population contributing to differences in economic opportunity.

Based on peer-reviewed, non-ideological economic research and driven by high-quality data that is available here for inspection, the EOI has developed a framework that provides policymakers with a tool that can help them assess the impact of their decisions.

To date, the EOI project has achieved two significant milestones: 1) it has refined and quantified existing hypotheses about economic opportunity and 2) it has introduced new dynamics and drivers that were rarely included in debates before. Among its findings:

• Human capital development is the largest single driver of economic opportunity – and 42% of the variation in outcomes is due to education at relatively young ages.
• There is a significant racial gap in expected lifetime earnings, with the widest gap – about 27% -- between typical Asian and Hispanic males.
• Health is not only important in prolonging lifespan, it is even more important in increasing the productivity of an individual’s income-generating years.
• More educated individuals are healthier and live longer, and even after controlling for other factors, educational attainment drives almost one-third of the health outcomes of Americans.

Explore the tool for yourself, and discover what you can do to increase your economic opportunity. less