Greg Rosalski

To be clear, that number is kind of an extrapolation.

Hope Six kids also went to college more often.

Incarceration rates for the boys who grew up there went down.

And those are pretty jaw-dropping findings.

But it was possible that they didn't have anything to do with making neighborhoods more mixed income or connecting public housing with the rest of their communities.

In other words, Hope Six might not have been what caused these good results at all.

This is Matt Steger, one of the economists on Raj's team.

He says the first explanation was that, yes, Hope Six was causing the good results.

And for Raj and Matt and the other researchers, this presented a real problem because it wasn't random who moved into the new Hope 6 housing.

Economists call this selection bias.

It was possible that the reason kids in Hope 6 were doing better as adults was, like Matt said, just that they were always going to do better, no matter where they lived.

The team had data on how long people lived in Hope Six developments as kids.

And it turned out you saw a way bigger impact on the kids who were there for a long time versus just a year or two.

You could see that dosage idea in the data.

Yeah, maybe those families who left super quickly were somehow less stable.

And that was why their kids saw less benefit than the kids and families who stayed put.

And this is where they made this move in the research that is honestly just so clever.

I'm going to give it like official planet money tip of the hat.

So what they did is they went ahead and compared the dosage effect within families by looking at siblings who both lived in Hope Six housing, but for different amounts of time.

Because if it was about just improving the physical housing itself, you'd want to put all your money into that.