Raj Chetty: belief

Transcript context

…Now to fast forward up to the present, we’ll go back to some of your earlier papers, but Adam Ozimek — who writes for Forbes — he said a few months ago, he was making predictions and he wrote on Twitter, quote, “It has been months since Raj Chetty unveiled some new really big results, feels like we’re due for a big one any day now.” And three days later you came out with a paper about the chance of rising up to be earning more money than your parents were. And here is my question: We’re at Silicon Valley, where every company asks, what is their comparative advantage or what is the moat surrounding them that makes their position stronger, invulnerable. If we look at your papers, they’re about topics people have already thought about. The data work is completely state of the art, but I don’t think it would be said you’re doing something other people can’t do, and yet several times a year, you come out with papers of great import that make a big splash, and the results seem to hold up. So what in fact is your competitive advantage? [laughs] That’s a tough question. Part of what we try to do is exactly as you said: take old questions. I think some of the most important questions in economics and social science have not yet been fully answered, and the recent availability of big data of various types allows us, for the first time, to tackle those classic questions. What our research group tries to do is bring those two things together. But those both sound replicable, right? What’s the non-replicable asset?…

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