Raj Chetty

But if you give people a new set of skills coupled with that social support here, what that means is a network that gets them an internship at a specific firm looking to hire for that new set of skills they have or support in finding that new job.

There's this new wave of programs called Per Scolas, Year Up, other such examples that have incredibly large impacts at very low cost and generate very high rates of return.

So I think there are many places where we can be having much greater impact without spending that much more money than we currently do, thereby helping people rise up and increasing our nation's productivity.

I think we spend a tremendous amount of money trying to address issues of poverty in the United States, trillion dollars a year, depending upon how you count, if not more.

But we are not doing that in a way that allows people to most effectively sustain themselves in the long run, coming back to creating opportunity as opposed to simply addressing the point in time poverty problem.

And I think when we unlock those opportunities,

We need to recognize that that's not just a matter of charity.

It's a matter of creating a more productive society that ultimately will increase GDP growth and benefit all of us.

And I think we could be doing much more, especially given modern evidence on what works in that space, as we just discussed, that can change many people's lives.

So I basically advise them to first follow the data.

So we now have data where you can look up in your own city, where is opportunity lacking the most?

Can go to a website called the Opportunity Atlas, literally type in different zip codes, different addresses, diagnose the problem very clearly.

Where do I need to focus for which subgroups?

Are things changing over time and so on?

So that gives you a clear picture of the problem.

And then in treating the problem, to make a medical analogy, we often focus on three different domains.

One is desegregation, helping people move to opportunity, could be through vouchers, could be through changes in zoning laws, school district boundaries, and so on.

The second approach is place-based investment.

This relates to the HOPE VI work that we just talked about.

How can you take the low opportunity places and turn them into higher opportunity areas?