Yesterday's New York Times looked at a study that tries to figure out whether the American dream is equally broken everywhere, or just more broken in some places than others.

The study — based on millions of anonymous earnings records and being released this week by a team of top academic economists — is the first with enough data to compare upward mobility across metropolitan areas. These comparisons provide some of the most powerful evidence so far about the factors that seem to drive people’s chances of rising beyond the station of their birth, including education, family structure and the economic layout of metropolitan areas.

And what has this study found?

Climbing the income ladder occurs less often in the Southeast and industrial Midwest, the data shows, with the odds notably low in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. By contrast, some of the highest rates occur in the Northeast, Great Plains and West, including in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle and large swaths of California and Minnesota.

In fact, Seattle is on par with Denmark and Norway when it comes to upward mobility. Hurrah!

Still, this is what it means to be in a city with one of "the highest rates" of upward mobility in the United States: If you're born into a Seattle family in which the parents make less than $25,000 a year, there's a 10 percent chance that you'll have family earnings of above $100,000 a year by the time you turn 45. (In Atlanta, the chance of that happening is 4 percent.)