5 ms·

Raj Chetty’s American Dream

13 points by johnny313 7y ago

mdorazio 7y ago
The gist of this seems to be "take poor families and give them assistance to move to neighborhoods with statistically higher opportunities". Which to me seems a little bit weird if taken to a broader extent - would that not lower the opportunity rates of the moved-to neighborhoods and potentially make the moved-from areas even worse off?
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  Chetty is regressing against the wrong thing, which is pretty typical for economists, who mostly seem to be political ideologues armed with least squares fitting and dumb models. He's basically suggesting school busing on a societal level, and we all know how well that turned out.
  - sfkdjf9j3j 7y ago
    What do you mean by, "we all know how that turned out"?
    - HarryHirsch 7y ago
      Wikipedia has an article on busing in Boston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_cr... It was a boon for politicians on either side. The right could say "look, it isn't working", and the left could say "we tried".
    - selimthegrim 7y ago
      How this article got past the editors without mentioning “all deliberate speed...” or anything about Swann is beyond me
- hogFeast 7y ago
  I laughed at this. Yes, this is what basically every economist suggests because of the way questions are posed (i.e. confusing correlation with causation...if all great salesman wear Rolexes, just buy all your bad salesman Rolexes...it is so simple, how did these simple-minded, non-rigorous managers not realise this!?). Political scientists (actually, this is more policy work...where I am this is done within politics) have been looking at these questions for decades. And, about thirty or forty years ago now, they discovered that historical contingency is very important. You can't just import policies from somewhere else, you can't just move people to where the successful people are...there is other stuff going on. Unfortunately, as economists can't measure these things, they remain wholly (and often wilfully) ignorant of these points. Economists seem - boosted no doubt by laudatory articles about how precocious they were as a child - to have infinite self-confidence. Decades of research on a topic? Irrelevant. "Did you know I have tenure?". "Did you know I use lots of equations in my research? That makes me a scientist you know...rigour!". It is also baffling that someone chose to write an article about someone failing to do any significant research (particularly as so much research already exists on this topic). Perhaps doing useful research matters far less than telling everyone that you are just about to do something important...just around the corner...did you know when I got tenure btw? Very young. I am genius. I was a very smart child. Look at this photo I have of myself holding a piece of chalk when I was a child...just around the corner...
- denzil_correa 7y ago
  The article does touch on the answer to your question > Chetty’s pitch to the nation is that our problems have technocratic solutions, but at times I sense that he is avoiding an argument. Surely our neighborhoods can be improved, and those improvements can help the next generation achieve better outcomes. But what of the larger forces driving the enormous disparities in American wealth? Poor people would be better off if their children had better prospects, but also if they had more money—if the fruits of our society were shared more broadly. “I can take money from you and give it to me, and maybe that is good and maybe it is not,” he said. “I feel like there are a lot of people working on redistribution, and it is hard to figure out the right answer there.” To focus on the question of who gets what is also, of course, politically incendiary.
codingslave 7y ago
Going to get downvoted for this, but: As time (t) => infinity, social mobility => 0 in any society that has a highly mobile social system. Those who are inherently predisposed to wealth and power and up in positions of wealth and power, and so do their children. As time goes on, the randomness of poor life environments gets washed out, and peoples children end up where they should (in the destiny sense). If we acknowledge that evolution is a real thing, then we should acknowledge that abilities and skill sets for moving up in society are genetic. Believeing in evolution without believing that peoples personalities and abilities are predetermined is illogical and nonsensical. We can keep playing the shell game of why things might be the opposite, but to me it seems really silly. Let's all run around concocting all sorts of theories about society and societal structure to hide the inconvenient and humiliating truth. In saying this, I am saying nothing about welfare, who should get it and why, because I do believe in strong welfare systems. I believe in equal opportunity, I just dont believe in mass constructed and distributed veils.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  In less words: this is the just-world theory. If this is true, why have chemists' earnings dropped so precipitiously following the 2008 recession? Their genetic makeup hasn't changed. What gives?!
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - codingslave 7y ago
    Who said the chemist was ever that valuable except for a small period in time? Maybe his children will make better choices
- jdm2212 7y ago
  To paraphrase Keynes: as time (t) => infinity, we're all dead. We don't live our lives in a society at the end of the long run, we live our lives in a society that exists here and now. Social mobility might end up at zero in a thousand years (or ten thousand years, or a hundred thousand years) but here and now we can make real people's lives better.
bin0 7y ago
First, this was too long. Well-done journalism does not have to be a tome unto itself; vignettes of his daughter the ballerina add little to the story besides acting as padding. Secondly, I don't get this part. From the article: > In the 1940s, the city built Independence Boulevard, a four-lane highway that cut through the heart of its Brooklyn neighborhood, dividing and displacing a thriving working-class black community. The damage continued in the ’60s and ’70s with new interstates. I don't get this part. I thought red-lining and confining blacks to ghettos was the problem? Wouldn't building an interstate mean more commerce and more prosperity?
- Frondo 7y ago
  The interstate highway system cut neighborhoods in half and let people drive right through them. it didn't bring people to them -- better local infrastructure would do that and that's been systematically underfunded for decades.
  - bin0 7y ago
    I get where you're coming from, but I'm not sure this was malicious. First, you could have driven around, which is probably what people did. More importantly, this happened all over with the interstate system; old railroad towns had their last gasp and newer highway towns replaced them. Finally, interstate is federal, so blame them if any one.
User23 7y ago
This is just yet another demographic map of the United States that happens to be using an extremely high quality data set. If anyone wonders why Raj Chetty can't seem to reach the obvious conclusions the data points to, it's because his job and reputation depends on him not doing so. So instead the work has absolutely no explanatory power and just suggests relocating poor performing people to good performing zip codes. Why that won't reduce inequality is left as an exercise for the reader. Lest anyone get the wrong idea, I'm criticizing because this supposed solution will be harmful to everyone. I want to improve outcomes for those who are doing poorly, this just won't do that.
- bassman9000 7y ago
  And the premise may be wrong altogether https://www.aei.org/publication/a-new-fed-report-suggests-american-upward-mobility-is-better-than-you-think/ https://www.aei.org/publication/a-new-fed-report-suggests-am... Measuring real growth properly is useful for addressing a host of questions. For example, existing studies use measured inflation to calculate the real income of children relative to their parents. Chetty et al. (2017) find that 50% of children born in 1984 achieved higher incomes than their parents at age 30. Adjusting for missing growth would raise the real income of children about 17% relative to their parents, increasing the fraction of those who do better than their parents by a meaningful amount. Thus, to the extent that inflation is overstated due to imputed values, a larger fraction of children appear to be better off economically than their parents. This improvement in economic welfare can shine a bit more positive light on current conditions, despite the gloom of slower productivity growth.

13 points by johnny313 7y ago

The gist of this seems to be "take poor families and give them assistance to move to neighborhoods with statistically higher opportunities". Which to me seems a little bit weird if taken to a broader extent - would that not lower the opportunity rates of the moved-to neighborhoods and potentially make the moved-from areas even worse off?

scottlocklin 7y ago
Chetty is regressing against the wrong thing, which is pretty typical for economists, who mostly seem to be political ideologues armed with least squares fitting and dumb models. He's basically suggesting school busing on a societal level, and we all know how well that turned out.
- sfkdjf9j3j 7y ago
  What do you mean by, "we all know how that turned out"?
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    Wikipedia has an article on busing in Boston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_cr... It was a boon for politicians on either side. The right could say "look, it isn't working", and the left could say "we tried".
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    How this article got past the editors without mentioning “all deliberate speed...” or anything about Swann is beyond me
hogFeast 7y ago
I laughed at this. Yes, this is what basically every economist suggests because of the way questions are posed (i.e. confusing correlation with causation...if all great salesman wear Rolexes, just buy all your bad salesman Rolexes...it is so simple, how did these simple-minded, non-rigorous managers not realise this!?). Political scientists (actually, this is more policy work...where I am this is done within politics) have been looking at these questions for decades. And, about thirty or forty years ago now, they discovered that historical contingency is very important. You can't just import policies from somewhere else, you can't just move people to where the successful people are...there is other stuff going on. Unfortunately, as economists can't measure these things, they remain wholly (and often wilfully) ignorant of these points. Economists seem - boosted no doubt by laudatory articles about how precocious they were as a child - to have infinite self-confidence. Decades of research on a topic? Irrelevant. "Did you know I have tenure?". "Did you know I use lots of equations in my research? That makes me a scientist you know...rigour!". It is also baffling that someone chose to write an article about someone failing to do any significant research (particularly as so much research already exists on this topic). Perhaps doing useful research matters far less than telling everyone that you are just about to do something important...just around the corner...did you know when I got tenure btw? Very young. I am genius. I was a very smart child. Look at this photo I have of myself holding a piece of chalk when I was a child...just around the corner...
denzil_correa 7y ago
The article does touch on the answer to your question > Chetty’s pitch to the nation is that our problems have technocratic solutions, but at times I sense that he is avoiding an argument. Surely our neighborhoods can be improved, and those improvements can help the next generation achieve better outcomes. But what of the larger forces driving the enormous disparities in American wealth? Poor people would be better off if their children had better prospects, but also if they had more money—if the fruits of our society were shared more broadly. “I can take money from you and give it to me, and maybe that is good and maybe it is not,” he said. “I feel like there are a lot of people working on redistribution, and it is hard to figure out the right answer there.” To focus on the question of who gets what is also, of course, politically incendiary.

codingslave 7y ago

Going to get downvoted for this, but: As time (t) => infinity, social mobility => 0 in any society that has a highly mobile social system. Those who are inherently predisposed to wealth and power and up in positions of wealth and power, and so do their children. As time goes on, the randomness of poor life environments gets washed out, and peoples children end up where they should (in the destiny sense). If we acknowledge that evolution is a real thing, then we should acknowledge that abilities and skill sets for moving up in society are genetic. Believeing in evolution without believing that peoples personalities and abilities are predetermined is illogical and nonsensical. We can keep playing the shell game of why things might be the opposite, but to me it seems really silly. Let's all run around concocting all sorts of theories about society and societal structure to hide the inconvenient and humiliating truth. In saying this, I am saying nothing about welfare, who should get it and why, because I do believe in strong welfare systems. I believe in equal opportunity, I just dont believe in mass constructed and distributed veils.

HarryHirsch 7y ago
In less words: this is the just-world theory. If this is true, why have chemists' earnings dropped so precipitiously following the 2008 recession? Their genetic makeup hasn't changed. What gives?!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- codingslave 7y ago
  Who said the chemist was ever that valuable except for a small period in time? Maybe his children will make better choices
jdm2212 7y ago
To paraphrase Keynes: as time (t) => infinity, we're all dead. We don't live our lives in a society at the end of the long run, we live our lives in a society that exists here and now. Social mobility might end up at zero in a thousand years (or ten thousand years, or a hundred thousand years) but here and now we can make real people's lives better.

bin0 7y ago

First, this was too long. Well-done journalism does not have to be a tome unto itself; vignettes of his daughter the ballerina add little to the story besides acting as padding. Secondly, I don't get this part. From the article: > In the 1940s, the city built Independence Boulevard, a four-lane highway that cut through the heart of its Brooklyn neighborhood, dividing and displacing a thriving working-class black community. The damage continued in the ’60s and ’70s with new interstates. I don't get this part. I thought red-lining and confining blacks to ghettos was the problem? Wouldn't building an interstate mean more commerce and more prosperity?

Frondo 7y ago
The interstate highway system cut neighborhoods in half and let people drive right through them. it didn't bring people to them -- better local infrastructure would do that and that's been systematically underfunded for decades.
- bin0 7y ago
  I get where you're coming from, but I'm not sure this was malicious. First, you could have driven around, which is probably what people did. More importantly, this happened all over with the interstate system; old railroad towns had their last gasp and newer highway towns replaced them. Finally, interstate is federal, so blame them if any one.

User23 7y ago

This is just yet another demographic map of the United States that happens to be using an extremely high quality data set. If anyone wonders why Raj Chetty can't seem to reach the obvious conclusions the data points to, it's because his job and reputation depends on him not doing so. So instead the work has absolutely no explanatory power and just suggests relocating poor performing people to good performing zip codes. Why that won't reduce inequality is left as an exercise for the reader. Lest anyone get the wrong idea, I'm criticizing because this supposed solution will be harmful to everyone. I want to improve outcomes for those who are doing poorly, this just won't do that.

bassman9000 7y ago
And the premise may be wrong altogether https://www.aei.org/publication/a-new-fed-report-suggests-american-upward-mobility-is-better-than-you-think/ https://www.aei.org/publication/a-new-fed-report-suggests-am... Measuring real growth properly is useful for addressing a host of questions. For example, existing studies use measured inflation to calculate the real income of children relative to their parents. Chetty et al. (2017) find that 50% of children born in 1984 achieved higher incomes than their parents at age 30. Adjusting for missing growth would raise the real income of children about 17% relative to their parents, increasing the fraction of those who do better than their parents by a meaningful amount. Thus, to the extent that inflation is overstated due to imputed values, a larger fraction of children appear to be better off economically than their parents. This improvement in economic welfare can shine a bit more positive light on current conditions, despite the gloom of slower productivity growth.