Raj Chetty

So after spending billions of dollars, if you simply tracked the earnings of the adults living in these places, you didn't seem to have achieved that much, which was disappointing.

But then we recognize, partly on the basis of prior research our team has done looking at people who move across neighborhoods, that where you live really matters much more for kids than it does for adults.

When you look at the kids growing up in these revitalized neighborhoods, you see a dramatically different picture.

The children growing up in revitalized public housing projects in these mixed income areas have 30%, 40% higher levels of earnings

than comparable children who were growing up in exactly the same place before revitalization.

That's exactly right.

Every extra year that you spend in a more integrated community, in a community with better schools, in a community with access to better job training programs, the better you do in adulthood.

And so if you grew up from birth in one of these revitalized communities, you got the biggest benefits.

First, at the most basic level, more than half of jobs in America are obtained through referrals.

So if you are connected to people who are working at a good company or working in a very different career to what your own parents are doing, you are more likely to get an internship or a referral to such a job, and that can make a big difference.

Second, and I think at a deeper level, if you think about the process of, say, applying to college,

may be familiar to many people who are around your parents who went to college and other peers who go to college.

But imagine you're the first in your family to go to college living in a community where very few people have gone to college, which is common for many low-income kids.

Well, how do you find out how should I prepare for the SAT?

How many times should I take the test?

What colleges should I apply to?

This is all kind of foreign.

And I think being connected to people who've had those experiences can provide valuable information that really changes people's lives.

Third, and I think maybe at the deepest level, and my suspicion, although we don't yet have the data to show this, is that this may be the most important channel, is that people's aspirations are shaped by who they're around.

If you've never met a scientist, never met somebody who started a successful business