This is the place.

Journey’s End monument at This Is the Place Heritage Park, overlooking the Salt Lake Valley. [Wikimedia Commons]

A couple weeks ago, Andrew Sullivan wrote a series of posts on social mobility in the U.S. by region, focusing on the lack thereof in the South according to a map from the New York Times. The nation’s most upwardly mobile city, according to that map, is Salt Lake City, Utah, and the Times’ written accompaniment compares it to Denmark and Norway in the social-mobility metric of likelihood that a child raised in the bottom 20% of income to the top 20% by adulthood. That probably surprised some folks: plenty of people forget that Utah even exists, and when they do think of it they think of skiing (aka rich people) and Mormons (aka conservative people). What’s that about social mobility?

As it turns out, it’s not the only surprising statistic about Utah, arguably the most conservative state in the country and basically the opposite of Denmark and Norway when it comes to social spending and other government policies ordinarily associated with mobility and low rates of poverty. For example, it is the fastest growing state in the country by some metrics. The Census Bureau ranked it fourth in this category in 2012, having dropped from first during the Great Recession. Study after study ranks it at or near the top in various categories of well-being, including access to clean water and employment satisfaction; some such surveys have Utah leaving runners-up in the dust. It recently had the lowest rate of child poverty and the fourth-highest child well-being, though it slipped in those categories as well due to the economy (while other states intervened when child well-being was at risk during the recession, Utah coasted).

Yet it posted leading numbers in earlier years despite having the second-lowest benefits for children through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, low Medicaid eligibility, and lowest-in-the-nation education spending (among other states who score highly in well-being rankings, these are extremely unusual characteristics; the study that ranked Utah highly also reported the overall conclusion that “child well-being is strongly related to higher state taxes and robust entitlement programs”). Teen pregnancy, out-of-wedlock births, abortions per capita: 47th, 50th, and 50th. Utahns, living up to their state motto, Industry, are the most productive workers. Forbes called it the best state for business, and the Pew Center on the States ranked it the best-governed.