The American Dream Paper

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The american dream paper is about the idea of doing better than your parents. It's trying to measure a simple statistic, what fraction of kids go on to earn more than their parents did. So at the surface you might think, well, that's like a simple calculation. But it turns out to be a lot more complicated because prices change overtime. And i think part of one of the lessons from these kind of programmes is you don't want to let other things be held constant,. Youd better try to move on a bunch of different, a bunch ofdifferent frods.

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.