How much does growing up in a healthy and cohesive community, or lack thereof, contribute to later long-term economic and social success in adulthood? Quite a lot, it would seem. Two Harvard sociologists, Robert Manduca and Robert J. Sampson, sought to better understand the relationships at play among environment, community, poverty, race, violence and social mobility in their paper, “Punishing and toxic neighborhood environments independently predict the intergenerational social mobility of black and white children,” recently published in PNAS. Their work specifically references and builds on several recent landmark studies by fellow Harvard researcher Raj Chetty and colleagues.