Raj Chetty: belief

Transcript context

…Chennai is actually my favorite Indian city, it may please you to know. So I agree with that. As you probably know, in the history of South India, there’s this long-standing tradition of mathematical prodigies. Your work isn’t exactly mathematical, but broadly speaking, of course, it is. And why is it you think there’s this connection between South India and this history of mathematical prodigies? Do you have any thoughts on that? Is it something about the abstract nature of the philosophical thinking embedded into South Indian Hinduism? Yes, it could be. The name that comes to mind most prominently is Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity . And I think that type of thinking is encouraged once you have a tradition of people in that vein. I remember hearing a lot about Ramanujan since I was a little kid. And so you look up to that kind of thing, and maybe that influences subsequent generations of children as well. I think that kind of mechanism is actually extremely important in terms of what children choose to do. 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?…

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