Factors Affecting Social Mobility in the United States

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The chapter discusses various factors influencing upward mobility in different regions of the United States, such as vibrant economies, integrated communities, and geographic differences in gender inequality. It explores the impact of social capital, segregation, and technology on long-term outcomes and highlights the stagnation in relative intergenerational mobility despite initiatives to invest in education for children from lower-income backgrounds. The speaker shares insights on future research plans to analyze how segregation and integration affect upward mobility rates using social network data and stresses the importance of urban planning and technology in addressing income segregation.

A high school teacher once told Raj Chetty he’d some day serve on the Federal Reserve Board. At the the time Raj thought the comment was silly, since he was busy working in the laboratory on staining techniques for electron microscopy and was set to become a biomedical scientist. About a decade later, however, and Chetty would become one of the youngest tenured economics professors at Harvard and would soon win both a John Bates Clark medal and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Now at Stanford, he’s one of the most-cited economists in the world.

Raj’s conversation with Tyler spans that well-cited body of work and more, including social mobility, the value-add of kindergarten teachers, why corporations pay dividends, his love of Piano Guys, the most underrated US state, and why okra may have been the secret of his success.

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Recorded March 25th, 2017 Other ways to connect

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