Economic Opportunity Index

What is the Economic Opportunity Index?

Hope Street Group's Economic Opportunity Index (EOI) is a groundbreaking project that seeks to develop a trustworthy set of measures that policy makers, media, and citizens can rely on to assess the impact of policies on economic opportunity for all Americans.

We measure economic opportunity as expected lifetime real income, given effort:

  • Expected - luck, individual circumstance, and societal change always play a role in economic outcomes.
  • Lifetime - a single year might give us a misleading snapshot of one's overall circumstances.
  • Real - adjusted for price changes.
  • Income - concerned here with economic opportunity, rather than non-economic opportunities such as freedom of expression.
  • Given effort - every individual makes their own individual tradeoffs between work and leisure.

  

Why the Index matters

The Index will bring hard facts and solid, nonpartisan analysis to what is now a confused and ideological debate that falls into the tired paradigm of "grow the pie" versus "redistribute the pie."  In our view, this misses the point because it is focused on the wrong "pie" altogether - we should aim to increase opportunity, and better outcomes will follow.

  

How the Index works

The Index is a weighted combination of indicators that have been shown to affect economic opportunity.  Indicators cover the broad areas of education, health care, macroeconomics, labor markets, and tax/regulatory policy.  The value of each indicator varies over time and across different segments of the population, contributing to differences in economic opportunity.

Hope Street Group will develop an online environment for the economics and policy community, and eventually the public at large, to critique, update, and continuously improve the Index over time, making it the living standard for "opportunity policy analysis."