Raj Chetty

So the way I think about this is the old adage that if you give a person a fish,

you feed them for a day.

If you teach a person to fish, you feed them for a lifetime.

And basically, the reason we focus on opportunity and earnings and economic mobility is the logic of teaching people how to fish.

If you give people that education, that social capital, the resources to succeed themselves,

then you've provided for them for years to come.

And not only that, they then provide to society in the form of higher tax revenues, new discoveries, new businesses that help all of us.

If you simply give people resources, of course, for people with health conditions or certain things that prevent them from working, that can be extremely important.

But that in and of itself is not going to be a way to help many people in the long run.

We simply don't have the resources to do that.

We need to help empower them to rise up.

In the context of education, we find that a number of different things matter.

I basically visualize it as a pipeline starting from birth to early adulthood, that first job you get that seems to also play a really important role in the subsequent career you pursue.

And throughout that pipeline, we find that there are various interventions basically improving the quality of the pipeline at each point.

that can help people do better.

Let me give you a few examples.

Start from preschool or early childhood nutrition.

There are a number of studies showing that when kids have access to better preschool environments, better kindergarten teachers, for example, that has long lasting effects on how well they do.

That continues throughout childhood, the quality of teaching matters, the quality of

classes you have in high school, how big your classes are, various factors shape kids outcomes.