The Economic Connectivity Measure You're Using Comes From Facebook

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The economic connectedness measure you're using comes from facebook data, which is rather extraordinary. You have an enormous amount of data from facebook that you've acquired in a privacy protected way. Talk about how you're using that. But how you can use that information from facebook to look to prospects for children and poorer families. So talk about how you do thatause o, kind of a magic trick.

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.