Raj Chetty: recommendation

Transcript context

…You can wreck them easily, but if they’re both in decent families, they seem to do more or less the same. Yeah. To me, the most convincing piece of evidence along those lines is studies of adopted kids actually, which directly try to assess the effects of environments. I’m less a fan of the twin studies because I feel like you don’t have a clear sense of why one twin ends up in a certain condition versus another twin. You don’t have an experiment there; you don’t know what’s driving that variation. In contrast, there’s some very nice work by Bruce Sacerdote, an economist at Dartmouth, looking at Korean adoptee kids who were effectively randomly assigned to families because of quirks and ordering of families’ applications and so forth. And he shows very convincing evidence that, if you happen to be an adopted kid who ends up in a family that’s more educated and more affluent and so forth, you do substantially better in adulthood than if you end up randomly assigned to a less educated, less affluent family living in a worse neighborhood. So I think that’s really clear evidence that, conditional on genetics, environment really matters. It’s a common view, derived from William Baumol and Bowen, that education is subject to a kind of cost disease, that it’s harder and harder to augment productivity, wages rise in other sectors of the economy, education takes a rising share of GDP but doesn’t really get much better. Do you accept that story, or, if not, how would you modify it? Are we doomed to low productivity growth in K–12 education?…

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