Raj Chetty

You just don't envision yourself going down that pathway.

We track the lives of millions of people who go on to become inventors.

And we find that women are much more likely to go on to become inventor as measured by having a patent if they grow up around female scientists.

But if they grew up around male scientists in exactly the same field, it has essentially no impact on their outcomes.

And I think that points to very clear and more general pattern in the data that people tend to emulate those around them.

If you can see someone like you who's pursued a certain career path, then you're more likely to do it yourself.

And so these more connected communities, I think, provide those aspirations for children from lower income backgrounds.

At a very simple level, if we're still thinking in the neighborhood context rather than rebuilding neighborhoods, a different approach is to help people move to higher opportunity neighborhoods using things like housing vouchers, on which we currently spend billions of dollars.

But I think we could do that again in a more productive way.

We see in the data that the millions of families that are receiving housing vouchers from the federal government

they're not actually using them to move to more connected higher opportunity areas because they're not receiving the social support needed in the housing search process itself to be able to find housing in one of these higher opportunity neighborhoods.

And we have conducted interventions in the city of Seattle that have since been replicated across the country that show that just providing a little bit of assistance when people are looking for housing can fundamentally change where they end up choosing to live.

and again, improve their kids' outcomes to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetimes.

Then the same logic applies in many other domains.

There's a recent program that some of my colleagues have been studying called Communities in Schools that essentially brings in social supports to kids in schools who may not be attending or who may be having challenges at home that are preventing them from excelling in school.

And they basically bring in a counselor and some support services to help you get through that period.

And they show

again, following kids' lives over long periods of time, that this program has very large benefits.

If we think about job training programs, there's a lot of discussion of workforce training these days in the United States, as you know, especially in the context of the AI revolution.

And there's a lot of evidence showing that if you simply train people to get different jobs, you don't have that much of an effect.