The "Real Time Economics" blog at The Wall Street Journal takes a look at Hope Street Group's Economic Opportunity Index (EOI) as "a new way to measure the road to prosperity."

Hope Street, organized in 2003, has created an online Economic Opportunity Index that seeks to measure the extent to which Americans — by race and gender — have opportunities available to achieve the American dream, and seek to identify the factors most important to improving opportunity in the future.

The most important category is human capital development, which includes education levels, incarceration rates and the divorce rate. Macroeconomic growth and inflation are less potent in the index because they don’t vary much across gender and race and therefore don’t cause as much of a variation in economic opportunity.

The goal is to "get at some of the underlying factors that drive opportunity … and create differences in opportunity between different groups of the population," said Andrew Tilton, the group’s policy director and a senior economist at Goldman Sachs & Co. "If you can gain some confidence on what those implications are then I think policy applications flow more freely."