Raj Chetty: belief

Transcript context

…Now, as I read your 2014 papers on mobility, they seem to suggest that, at least in recent times, intergenerational income mobility in this country actually has not been getting worse, contrary to what many people thought was the case. Your former Harvard colleague, Robert Putnam, in his latest book, he basically wrote he doesn’t believe the numbers. He’s not faulting your work. He just thinks, given the return to higher education is rising, there’s wage stagnation, plenty of evidence of regional decay, that it must somehow be the case that intergenerational income mobility is getting worse; we’re just not measuring it properly. Do you agree with Putnam? Or do you agree with your own numbers? I think our numbers are right. The fact is that relative intergenerational mobility — by that I mean, your chances of moving up or down in the ranks in terms of percentiles — has not changed significantly over the past 40 years or something like that. That is, if you’re born to parents in the bottom 20 percent, your odds of making it to the middle class or to the top 20 percent look roughly the same today as they did 30, 40 years ago. Now, why is that the case? I think Bob correctly points out that there are lots of trends going in a direction that might have led you to think that this would be getting worse over time. For instance, he shows in his work that the rich are investing more in their children’s education, spending more time reading to their kids, for example, relative to kids from lower-income families. But you also have to remember that, at the same time, over the past 50 years, we have been fighting the War on Poverty and investing more in kids from lower-income backgrounds, trying to expand access to higher education. Expanding pre-school programs, Head Start, and so forth. So the fact that you don’t see any change in relative mobility in light of all those major social investments, from that perspective, it’s actually surprising that things haven’t improved. My view is you’ve got these two countervailing sets of trends, and that’s left us at a standstill in terms of relative mobility. However, in our more recent work, we show that absolute mobility — your chance of doing better than your parents, which arguably is what people really think of as the American dream — that has fallen dramatically over the past 50 years. And that’s your most recent paper from December?…

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