9 of the 10 best cities for upward mobility are in Blue states

Anybody surprised? The bottom 10 are all swing state or red state cities.

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Obama said the gap was widening between corporate profits and employee wages. The top 1% has done well, he said, but many other Americans have been left floundering. “Today, after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better,” the president said. “But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled.”

He may have been right about stagnant wages: In the fourth quarter of 2013, the median weekly salary of full-time workers was $786, just 1.4% higher than a year earlier and barely above inflation (1.2%), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But upward mobility is a tale of many cities, according to a recent report analyzing 741 commuting zones—“Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the U.S.”—by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Washington, D.C.