Are You Agnostic?

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

We view the facebook data largely as a proxy for the types of off line interactions that people are having. We're not per se interested or able to really isolate the impacts of online interactions themselves. For lower income folks, neighborhood's physical proximity turns out to be very important. But interestingly, parts of west virginia has a surprisingly high level of economic connectedness.

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.