MEGAN MCARDLE: How Utah Keeps The American Dream Alive. “Once I got there, I found that it’s hard to even get a complete picture of how Utah combats poverty, because so much of the work is done by the Mormon Church, which does not compile neat stacks of government figures for the perusal of eager reporters.”

Plus: “David Sims, a Brigham Young economist who has done work on income mobility, suggests that the secret to Utah’s especially good mobility is not that it’s especially good at building effective public institutions. What it’s especially good at is a sort of middle classness that’s so broad it’s almost infectious.” Weirdly, the intelligentsia in the rest of America have been waging war against the very idea of “middle classness” for 50 years — and at the same time, social dysfunction among the poor and working classes has gotten worse. Go figure.