For the 2019 period, Utah’s income measures tell a consistent story of nation-leading income equality at all levels: Utah, with a Gini coefficient of 0.4268, ranked first for income equality among states and the District of Columbia. The Salt Lake City metropolitan area, with a Gini coefficient of 0.4257, ranked first for income equality among metropolitan areas over one million in population. West Jordan city and West Valley City in Utah ranked first and sixth, respectively, for income equality among cities over one hundred thousand in population. Finally, a census tract in Salt Lake County (tract 1135.26) in the 2005–9 period ranked third highest for income equality among 61,358 neighborhoods surveyed in the entire coun­try.10 Although few might expect a consistently Republican, low-tax state like Utah to lead the way in this category, clearly these results show that Utah and the Greater Salt Lake Area offer something im­portant to people who value income equality.

Another indicator of Utah’s economic exceptionalism is high rates of social mobility. Harvard economist Raj Chetty and a team of researchers in their 2014 study “Where Is the Land of Opportunity?: The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States” identified Salt Lake City (along with San Jose, California) as having the highest rate of absolute mobility in the nation.

Chetty defines absolute mobility as the odds that a child will earn more than his or her parents did at the same age. His team used deidentified IRS tax records to analyze economic mobility. They found that Salt Lake City ranks first among the fifty largest com­muter zones (aggregations of counties) in the country for absolute up­ward mobility.

. . . .Spencer P. Eccles. . . .coined the term “Utah’s secret sauce” when he served as the director of the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development. This secret sauce is not the fry sauce Utahns love so much (a mixture of ketchup and mayonnaise that is said to have originated at a Utah burger shop), but rather the way Utahns collaborate to prevent and solve problems.

Academics have another name for this: social capital—the network of relationships in a society that enables it to function effectively.

. . . .In 2017 the JEC released “What We Do Together: The State of Associational Life in America.” In it they define associational life, share its importance, and describe how it has changed—in families, religious worship, communities, and work. This report laid the groundwork for numerous other studies to follow, including a 2018 study which included the JEC’s own social capital index. The JEC reviewed seventy county- and state-level indicators, then settled on thirty-two measures for inclusion in their state-level index, which includes indicators of family unity and interaction, social support, community health, institutional health, collective efficacy, and phil­anthropic health.

If Utah’s secret sauce is the real deal, you would expect Utah to rank highly in the social capital index. True to form, Utah ranked highest in the nation.