How social and economic mobility plays out in society is a subject that has a personal resonance with Raj Chetty, William A Ackman Professor of Public Economics at Harvard University, and a recent recipient of Harvard University’s prestigious George Ledlie Prize.    

“My parents, who grew up in very low-income families and villages in South India...the opportunities they had were greatly shaped by the fact that they happened to be the ones who were picked to get a higher education in their families,” said Chetty talking to PTI recently.   

 Chetty said it was common at that time in developing countries for a family to pick only one child to get advanced education because they couldn’t afford to educate all the kids. “And it so happened to be that my mom was the one chosen in her family, and my dad was the one chosen in his family,” he said. 

“And I could kind of see how that’s played out through the generations in my own family, through the opportunities my cousins have had versus what I’ve had... ending up here at Harvard and the various opportunities I’ve had, I felt have stemmed from that.”

Role of geography

Chetty said one of the most impactful outcomes they have been able to observe is the role geography plays in children’s outcomes. Chetty, in his research, has shown that where children grow up, their neighbourhoods, environment, community, schools are big determinants in the kind of economic opportunities they have. 

According to an article in Atlantic magazine, Chetty used big data “to show how American families fare across generations revealing striking patterns of upward mobility and stagnation. In one early study, he showed that children born in 1940s had a 90 per cent chance of earning more than their parents, but for children born four decades later, that chance had fallen to 50 per cent, a toss of a coin.”    

More tellingly, Chetty’s research also showed that a boy born in a wealthy African-American family is “more than twice likely to end up poor as a white boy from a wealthy family”. The Atlantic article says that big data is being used by Chetty as a moral force in the “American debate”. 

  In Chetty’s recent working paper titled, ’Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges’, he and his co-researchers (David J Deming and John Friedman), study the disproportionate number of leadership positions held by graduates of elite colleges and use admissions and income data to analyse this question. They conclude that elite colleges tend to “amplify persistence of privilege across generations” and can increase social diversity by changing admission policies.      

  The 44-year-old Chetty earned a doctorate degree from Harvard when he was 28 and was one of its youngest tenured Professors. He won the John Bates Clark medal, which is awarded to a promising economist under 40, in 2013, and got the McArthur genius grant in 2012. In 2020 he was awarded the Infosys Prize in Economics. 

   Chetty is also Director of Opportunity Insights, which is a research group that identifies economic hurdles and presents scalable solutions to help Americans move out of poverty.  

 Chetty was born in New Delhi and moved to the US when he was 9. His mother is a pulmonologist and his father, VK Chetty, is also a renowned economist who taught at the Indian Statistical Institute at Delhi and later at Boston University.    

  Harvard economist Edward Glaeser is quoted in the Atlantic article as saying, “The question with Raj is not if he will win a Nobel Prize, but when.” 

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