Zip Codens Is Destiny

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This is aes fantastically ambitious enterprise. I'm very sceptical about it, so won give you a chance to convince me. What one of the challenges for me is that this idea that neighborhood is destiny. And especially given that we can't observe all the things we care about,. i find it hard to understand how you can take that leap and say, well, if you grup in one of thesea rocket pad, you know, neighborhoods where you can be launched into economic success.

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.