I don’t ordinarily find myself scrambling to write down article ideas during these conversations, but almost everything Raj Chetty says is worth a feature unto itself. For instance:
- Great Kindergarten teachers generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in future earnings for their students
- Solving poverty would increase life expectancy by more — far more — than curing cancer
- Public investment focused on children often pays for itself
- The American dream is more alive in Canada than in America
- Maps of American slavery look eerily like maps of American social mobility — but not for the reason you’d think
Chetty is a Harvard economist who has been called “the most influential economist alive today.” He’s considered by his peers to be a shoo-in for the Nobel prize. He specializes in bringing massive amounts of data to bear on the question of social mobility: which communities have it, how they got it, and what we can learn from them.
What Chetty says in this conversation could power a decade of American social policy. It probably should.
References:
Atlantic profile
Vox profile
Books:
Scarcity:The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matt Desmond
How to Catch a Heffalump
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
