Is It Hard to Build a New House in the United States?

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High housing prices have made it hard for low income people to move to higher opportunities places serve. It's against the law in many cities to offer a small apartment as an option. The way we've organized education in america means that poor people are goig to live, go to schol with other poor people and rich people tend to go o school with other rich people. And then finally, there's the way we've made health care part of a employment in the united states.

Economist Raj Chetty of Harvard University talks about his work on economic mobility with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. The focus is on Chetty's recent co-authored study in Nature where he finds that poor people in America who are only connected to other poor people do dramatically worse financially than poor people who are connected to a wider array of economic classes. The discussion includes the policy implications of this result as well as a discussion of Chetty's earlier work on the American Dream and the challenge of Americans born in recent decades to do better financially than their parents.