What Is Actually Robust?

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Economists have worried that we might be overstating inflation, mainly because of technological innovation. rust: No body disputes the view that rates of absolute upward mobility are lower in the current era than they were for kids born in the forties and fifties. Rust: And i just would add 50 per cents a particularly depressing number, because it means that 50 % do worse than their parent. Is that jus about therits af a very important number?

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.