Speaker

Raj Chetty

Raj Chetty

Indian-American economist; Professor of Economics at Harvard University and director of Opportunity Insights, a research lab that uses administrative data to study economic mobility and inequality. Tyler Cowen, in 2017, described him as the single most influential economist in the world.

Chetty grew up in a Tamil family with deep roots in Indian academia — his grandfather was a Gandhi-era freedom fighter who championed women’s education; his father is an econometrician who trained under Arnold Zellner. He arrived in the United States as a child, passed through Milwaukee’s starkly stratified school landscape, and enrolled at Harvard at seventeen, where he began working independently with Martin Feldstein before completing his undergraduate degree. His research draws on administrative data — tax records, school registers, social security files covering entire populations — combined with quasi-experimental methods that convert observational variation into causal claims. The hallmark of his group’s work is a conceptual move that allows an imperfect dataset to answer a question it was not designed for, executed with an aesthetic insistence on clarity that makes the result appear, in retrospect, obvious.

Core positions

Opportunity is allocated by accident of birth in ways that are empirically measurable and, Chetty argues, malleable by policy. His kindergarten-teacher research shows that early childhood educators transmit non-cognitive skills — discipline, social competence — that raise adult earnings even when intermediate test-score gains have entirely faded, pointing to a mechanism the school system does not currently price or reward. His geography research finds that upward mobility varies enormously by place and is most strongly predicted by socioeconomic integration: cross-class contact forged in shared schools and activities, which large cities and their self-segregating infrastructure systematically undermine. On the aggregate trend, he distinguishes sharply between relative mobility (percentile rank movements, roughly stable for forty years) and absolute mobility (the chance of earning more than one’s parents in real terms, which has halved since the 1940s birth cohort). The collapse of absolute mobility, he argues, is driven by inequality in how growth is distributed, not by any slowdown in growth itself.

In the wiki