How to Measure Economic Mobility in the United States

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In the facebook data, we don't measure mobility directly. What i'd like to do is take a set of kids who grew up in low income families. They're now working as adults. You need to be something like age 30 to have a reliable measure of your income. If you look at people an thei'r twenties, some of them are in college, it's too early, basically. So if i want to look at a 30 year old now, they have to be born back in 19 90 or even before that,. And you're not going to be able to measure that within the facebook data directly. We use information from anonymized tax returns to measure economic mobility a

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.