Raj Chetty

Exactly right.

Here we're talking about economic segregation, which truly seems to be the key predictor of upward mobility.

Of course, it could be correlated with racial segregation because black people in particular tend to have lower incomes at present in the United States.

But here we're talking about economic segregation.

We find very clearly in the data, again, analyzing the lives of 20 million kids who grew up in different neighborhoods in America, that the exact neighborhood in which you live, not just which city, but which borough of New York, which side of the street you live on in some cases,

plays a really fundamental role in determining how kids do, where exactly you live can determine which school you attend, which college you end up going to, and so on.

But I think one of the most important reasons that place matters is because it determines who you interact with.

It's because it determines your social capital.

Perhaps the most important form of wealth we all have, not financial wealth, but our social wealth,

Who do we learn from?

Who inspires us?

Who tells us that even if you're not a doctor, here's the pathway to becoming a doctor?

Those kinds of influences really shape how people end up doing.

In our new study, we analyzed a very large program, $17 billion program called HOPE VI, which sought to take some of the lowest opportunity neighborhoods that we've been talking about in America

high-poverty public housing projects.

There are famous examples that listeners may have heard of like Cabrini-Green in Chicago or large housing projects in New York City known for being tough environments with high rates of crime, high rates of poverty, and so forth.

And basically, Hope Six in the 1990s and 2000s said, let's essentially demolish these high-poverty public housing projects and

and try to create revitalized mixed income neighborhoods on the thesis that maybe this would change social dynamics and change the resources that people have and maybe bring better lives to the people who are living there.

When we first started to look at the data, then frankly, the results were actually somewhat disappointing.

If you look at the adults who lived in these projects before they were revitalized and followed them over time, you saw very little change in their economic outcomes afterwards.