Jeremy Ney
Jeremy is a professor at Columbia, a former policymaker at the Federal Reserve, and the author of the best selling American Inequality Substack. His research focuses on the Geography of Opportunity and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, PBS, NBC, TIME Magazine, and Business Insider. Jeremy has degrees from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Opportunity Mapping
Jeremy Ney’s book explores inequality and opportunity in the US through the lenses of place, people, and patterns of data, offering a bold new approach to solving some of the country’s most complex problems. Jeremy travels to the regions with the worst housing, healthcare, education, employment, and incomes to understand how these crises took root. But along the way, he uncovers something remarkable: for many of the most distressed places in America, there exists a counterpart—a community that is demographically and economically similar, but thriving.
The two areas may share the same racial and population makeup, the same dominant industries, the same rural or urban character—even the same cultural attitudes, but their outcomes couldn’t be more different. In the “mirror region” people live longer, graduate at higher rates, have better access to food and credit—and most importantly, children are far more likely to achieve the American Dream. What accounts for the difference? What are the mirror regions doing right, and why haven't others followed?