There's a lot less of mobility, physical mobility, in the united states. You don't actually need to move from west virginia to new york often. You can move within your own community to a place where we're seeing much better outcomes for kids. And so this was puzzling to us. We spend about forty five billion a year on affordable housing programs. But what we and others noticed as, despite receiving those vouchers, which should make a number of neighborhoods more affordable, these families were still living in high poverty, lower opportunity areas.
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.