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Hillary Clinton raised the right question, which is a start.

"Why," she asked Monday morning, "do some communities have, frankly, more ladders for opportunity than other communities?"

The likely 2016 Democratic frontrunner was headlining a roundtable discussion at the Center for American Progress on expanding opportunity in urban America. This question is actually a sophisticated and hugely important one, and the fact that Clinton is thinking about it hints at what could be an important theme in the coming election.

By definition, the American Dream sounds like an American phenomenon, something equally accessible to hard workers whether they live in a big city or a rural community, the North or the South, a Rust Belt town or a Sun Belt suburb. But, in fact, an accumulating body of research suggests that children growing up in some parts of the country have much better odds than children elsewhere of climbing up the economic ladder, of rising from poor roots to head middle- and upper-class households of their own.

The American dream, it turns out, is not a universal promise. It's more real for children in Seattle than Atlanta, for poor kids growing up around Salt Lake City than Charlotte.

Clinton cited Monday the research that helped document this, a landmark study led by Raj Chetty and other researchers at Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley released in 2013. They found that a child's prospects for economic mobility vary greatly and disturbingly by geography in America. There's something about metropolitan Seattle, in other words, that's more conducive to intergenerational mobility than Atlanta.

So what is that something (or somethings)? A couple of years ago as recently as the last presidential election we didn't even know to ask this question. Now that we do, we can have an election-season debate about social mobility that goes far beyond empty platitudes about hard work versus helping hands.

"How do we promote success and upward mobility?" Clinton said on Monday. "Its not only about average income, as important as that is. You can look at cities that on average have similar affluence, but people are trapped and not able to move up in one city, and are moving up in another."

Metropolitan Seattle and Atlanta have comparable median incomes. But in Seattle, about one in 10 kids raised by families in the bottom fifth of household incomes will rise to the top fifth by age 30. In Atlanta, the same is true for only about one in 25 kids at the bottom.

Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez have offered some initial answers as to what might be going on. Social mobility appears to be higher, they found, in metropolitan areas with less economic and racial segregation, with better schools, more social capital and lower rates of single parenthood. Other researchers at CAP have found higher social mobility among metros with a large middle class.

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Wonkblog: Hillary Clinton is getting serious about social mobility