Raj Chetty: evaluation

Transcript context

…And Milwaukee, in your later work, you show to be a city where there’s not a lot of upward mobility. It’s a highly segregated city by income, by race. It’s doing poorly on some social indicators. What did you learn from those years you spent in Milwaukee? You were quite young, but if you were thinking about the Taj Mahal, what was your thought about Milwaukee back then? I went to an outstanding college prep school, private school, in Milwaukee called the University School of Milwaukee. At the time, I recognized the fact that the resources and opportunities we had at that school, which was on something like a 150-acre campus on the north side of Milwaukee, were extremely different from other schools that I visited, which I happened to visit in the context of the chess team and tennis team that I was on. So you’d see other schools and you’d see the vast differences in terms of how this private school looked relative to the public schools and what the neighborhoods looked like and so forth. It struck me — we lived on one side of the city, and I’d take the bus through the entire city, essentially, to get to the school. So you could feel the degree of segregation, which was one of the other things. In our current work, we see Milwaukee as one of the most segregated cities. Those types of places tend to have the lowest levels of upward mobility. So I happened to be lucky and be on the other end of the spectrum. For kids of affluent families, Milwaukee has as good outcomes as any city in the US, and my experience was very consistent with that. I think, once again, seeing those disparities made me wonder how much of where I will end up in life happens to be because of having the opportunity to go to this school as opposed to going to some other school within that city. Now your father, he’s a well-known economist, and he studied econometrics with Arnold Zellner at University of Wisconsin. At what age did he start talking to you about Bayesian econometrics?…

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