Raj Chetty

And the third is to connect people

to higher education after age 18, the key touch point is not the home you're living in, but typically the college you might attend.

How can we create better pathways to upward mobility at that point, not just through traditional higher education, but very importantly, through vocational programs, through modern day apprenticeships,

A number of these can be highly effective.

So I think there's a clear playbook one can follow in each of these domains.

And I would encourage people to look at evidence we've compiled on our website, Opportunity Insights, that we can inform that.

A mistake people often make, I think, is to say, I'm just going to spend a lot of money on this problem, or I'm going to focus on the dollars that I spend in these various buckets without thinking as carefully about exactly how is that being spent and how is that end-line service being used

by people who are often in very difficult circumstances and need social support to even take advantage of the resources you're offering.

So you may set up a new program, which seems very exciting on paper, but in practice, people with two jobs and multiple kids and many other challenges don't have the ability to actually make the best use of that.

And so I think thinking carefully about how you provide that social support to use that effectively to help people rise up is extremely important.

The first takeaway I would like to leave the audience with is that we should focus on expanding opportunity to address many of the challenges we face in society today.

My second takeaway is that we should focus on connecting people to opportunity.

Who you are connected to, what your social capital is, is really a key driver of economic opportunity at an individual level and at a broader level as well.

And my third takeaway, the broadest level, is that we spend a lot of effort and money, in my view, on programs that try to solve this problem of addressing poverty, creating opportunity, helping increase productivity in our country.

But unlike in the business world where you would very carefully measure the impacts of

of every expenditure you have and try to maximize profits and minimize costs.

In this context, we spend hundreds of billions of dollars and we often have very little idea what's working and what's not.

But now, thanks to modern data and methods, we can get a much better sense of which programs are working and which programs are not.

And so I would encourage people to think carefully about how to measure the effectiveness of the many efforts they're undertaking.

I think we can have a much bigger impact that way.