Pre-Read · Lunch & Learn, Friday, October 2
Raj Chetty and Opportunity Insights
A 101 on the researcher whose definition of mobility we measure ourselves against
Raj Chetty is the William A. Ackman Professor of Economics at Harvard and director of Opportunity Insights, the non-partisan, not-for-profit research group he leads there with economists John Friedman and Nathaniel Hendren. He is widely regarded as the leading empirical researcher on economic mobility in the United States.
Opportunity Insights links very large administrative datasets — anonymized tax records, census data, school records — to follow tens of millions of Americans from childhood into adulthood, and so answer a question surveys cannot: for a child growing up in a particular place, what actually happened to their earnings? Its stated aim is to identify barriers to economic opportunity and develop scalable solutions.
The number that defines the problem
50%
of children born in the 1980s went on to out-earn their parents — down from roughly
90% of children born in 1940. The decline runs across the whole income distribution, and is steepest for
the middle class.
The metric we hold ourselves to
Chetty’s definition of economic mobility
A person’s inflation-adjusted earnings at age 30, measured against what their parents earned at the same age.
Precisely: children’s household income at age 30, CPI-adjusted, against their parents’ household income at age 30. It is a demanding test — it ignores credentials earned, programs completed and jobs placed, and asks only whether a person ended up materially better off than the household they came from. This is the north-star metric Goodman Philanthropies measures its own grantmaking against.
His other central finding is that mobility is local: rates vary sharply between neighboring counties and even between city blocks, and outcomes track where a child grew up rather than where they live as an adult — which is why the group maps opportunity at neighborhood resolution.
What they publish
The Opportunity Atlas — mobility outcomes for every neighborhood in
America. opportunityatlas.org
Social Capital Atlas — cross-class friendship and its link to mobility.
socialcapital.org
College Mobility Report Cards — which colleges move students up the
income ladder.
Economic Tracker and Migration Patterns — real-time economic data
by place.
At lunch on Friday
We sit with Chetty and his team at their offices in Harvard Square. The conversation will center on their newest work, Opportunity Capital — a way of evaluating social programs faster and more cheaply, producing something close to real-time return data. Come with questions.
Sources
- Opportunity Insights, Harvard University — description, leadership and research areas. opportunityinsights.org · rajchetty.com
- Chetty, Hendren, Grusky, Hell, Manduca & Narang, “The Fading American Dream,” Science 356(6336): 398–406, 2017. opportunityinsights.org
- Chetty, Hendren, Kline & Saez, “Where is the Land of Opportunity?” QJE 129(4), 2014; Chetty, Friedman, Hendren, Jones & Porter, “The Opportunity Atlas,” 2018.
