Is There a Silver Bullet in Education?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Economists have often looked at your ability to thrive economically. Rass: If you could live in a high income area and have lots of economic connections, social connections to the people around you, even though you were going to the same horrible school that you were in before. The implication is s that those social and economic connections could overcome the poor human capital that you would be acquiring.

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.