No one has done more to dispel the myth of social mobility than Raj Chetty. But he has a plan to make equality of opportunity a reality.

Raj Chetty’s ideas and research are featured in the Aug. 2019 issue of the Atlantic in a lengthy article, linked below. The big takeaway, is that really Big Data Sets, such as the government has access to, and which are sometimes shared with researchers, can lead to useful pictures of  US demographics through the use of researcher’s algorithms, and extremely powerful server farms.

What we can learn from such detailed demographics is the subject of the story below. It involves some of the core questions about what economics and sociology are good at, and what they are not so good at, with distinctions such as between causation and correlation and:

What is cause, and what is effect, and what are we missing?

Chetty is currently researching what might account for how some advance up the ladder of the “American Dream”, and how others don’t. He’s especially interested in how one can determine the array of facts in his huge demographic studies, as to success over a generation. IOW, some children go on to advance past where their parents “got to”, and other’s don’t, and if we research it in enough detail maybe we can determine what the most important factors are…and then address those.

Clearly there are huge advantages if parents have copious resources to deploy on behalf of their children. But Chetty suggests that’s not the whole story at all. Digging down he finds that locations where children live, and how often and how early they move, are also very important indicators of future advancement. 

So certain locations in certain parts of the US, even at the scale of neighborhoods can be examined for future “results” over a generation. However the particular variable, or factor, that accounts for certain important differences is much harder to determine. Clearly some neighborhoods provide richer social support and integration platforms that aid advancement, but how that works is apparently still a mystery, to economists, and maybe also to sociologists.

Here is where PSA suggests there’s a connection between Asa Stone’s ideas about how important empathy skills are to advancement in today’s world, and the presumed learning of empathy by direct experience in Community Schools, and Raj Chetty’s studies about locations and advancement.

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