Raj Chetty: belief

Transcript context

…There are a number of writers, as you know, who’ve tackled the highly diverse Indian American experience. One of them is Jhumpa Lahiri, who’s actually been a guest on this podcast series. But of that whole literature, who or what in it speaks to you the most, given that you have your own Indian American history? There are a bunch of books that broadly focus on integration of Indians in Western society and what that entails and how different America is from India. What speaks to me is that there are obviously quite significant differences between the two cultures. But the experience I’ve had is that America’s been an incredibly welcoming place since I was a kid. When I first came to the United States, it took some time to adjust, as it would for any child coming from a completely different background. But I found, on the whole, Americans to be very interested in Indian culture and to be very welcoming. That’s the experience I’ve had. I know other people have had different experiences, but to me that’s the main thing I think of. In 1969, your father published a pretty well-known piece in the American Economic Review, called “On Measuring the Nearness of Near-Moneys.” And it implies there are a lot of close substitutes for moneys. So, in light of this, given that India has recently tried a demonetization, which has been highly controversial — the Indian demonetization, would you say underrated or overrated?…

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