Is There a Leap to Measure Neighborhood Effects?

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Neighborhoods that have more economic cidconnectedness tend to have more successful experiences down the road than neighborhoods that don't. The way you can interpret this is, if i were to take a given and put that child at a young age in a connected community, i would see better outcomes for that given child," he says.

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.