Raj Chetty
speaker
232 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 3 Feb
Raj Chetty’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And so I think that's a really central reason that these kinds of interactions likely matter.
I think we could be doing more in terms of housing policy to create opportunities.
I think we could be both spending money that we're already spending, which is $70 billion a year on various affordable housing programs, more effectively.
And we could potentially expand certain programs and design them better to improve outcomes.
But they have that same effect of creating that interaction that really seems to be the key mechanism through which Hope Sex had an effect.
Yeah, so one of the basic findings that's emerged in this research over the past decade is that where you grow up plays an enormous role in shaping your long-term outcomes. And what we've been focused on since identifying that result is trying to figure out why. Is it because of resources available in the area, the quality of schools, the quality of jobs, public transit?
Is it about who you're interacting with, who you're influenced by? And what we found in a nutshell is that social capital, who you're connected to, and in particular, the amount of interaction between low and high income people in a given area, is one of the strongest predictors of differences in economic mobility worldwide.
We find that in some places and for some subgroups, Black Americans, for example, growing up in low-income families, they now have slightly better chances of rising up than they did in the past in many places. White kids growing up in low-income families, unfortunately, have worse chances of rising up than they did in the past.
So what is leading to these disparate changes across subgroups, across areas? We looked at many different factors, and what we find is that there's one variable that strongly predicts these differences, which is the change in the share of parents who are working in these subgroups in the area in which you grew up.
The Black-white gap in economic mobility has fallen by one-third. In part because poor white communities are falling behind where they used to be. It comes back to the influences of social interaction. If you're growing up in a thriving community where lots of adults can inspire you to pursue a career in education,
you know, engineering or connect you to an internship opportunity or give you a sense of what kind of college could be good for you, that puts you on a very different trajectory than if you're growing up in a community where all of those things have disappeared.
That's what this most recent study shows titled Changing Opportunity. It's actually possible to change places and make them higher opportunity areas for the kids living there.
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