The Wealth of People, Not Places

Will Wilkinson points out, with his typical enthusiasm, a paper that tries to develop a metric on the wealth of people rather than the wealth of places:

It is easy to learn the average income of a resident of El Salvador or Albania. But there is no systematic source of information on the average income of a Salvadoran or Albanian. In this new working paper, research fellow Michael Clemens and non-resident fellow Lant Pritchett create a new statistic: income per natural — the mean annual income of persons born in a given country, regardless of where that person now resides.

I like this, but I'd like to work on a domestic version of this. When places fail (towns, neighborhoods) and people move out, we typically focus on the place failure. But those people moving out went on to something else, some worse, most probably better. We don't do a good job of capturing that aspect of change.