THE AMERICAN DREAM has long loomed as the guiding promise of life in the United States. Seeds of the idea can be seen in the country’s founding documents, but the phrase itself first emerged just under 100 years ago. In 1931, historian James Truslow Adams popularized the term in his book The Epic of America to describe a society of opportunity for all, regardless of social class.

Today, the American dream seems more a mythic ideal than lived reality. The country has been buffeted by decades of economic insecurity, with upward mobility increasingly elusive, especially for those on the lower rungs of the income ladder. That angst has been a driving force in national politics, fueling populist discontent from the left and right.

As the American dream has slipped out of reach for many, few have done more than Raj Chetty to try to understand the fading of the American dream and what could be done to change that dispiriting trendline.

A professor of economics at Harvard, Chetty has emerged as the country’s preeminent scholar of economic mobility. The 46-year-old son of Indian immigrants has established an entire research center, Opportunity Insights, focused on understanding the barriers to economic opportunity and upward mobility, and on crafting solutions aimed at helping people chart a path out of poverty.

Chetty’s work pulls on strands of earlier research from a number of his Harvard colleagues, including sociologist William Julius Wilson, who chronicled the disappearance of work in inner cities and the economic isolation it brought, and fellow economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who have documented the ways in which educational achievement is not keeping up with the demands of advances in technology. Most notable, however, has been Chetty’s work on the impact of “social capital” on economic mobility, building on research by Robert Putnam, who launched the issue of civic connectedness into the public conversation with his book Bowling Alone, published in 2000.

Chetty has opened the door to a dramatically more fine-tuned understanding of economic mobility by making use of “big data” — enormous datasets drawing on the experience of tens of millions of Americans — to provide a strong evidence base explaining the factors that propel economic gains or inhibit them.

While circumstances like growing up in areas of concentrated poverty, or in single-parent households, have long been associated with low economic mobility, the effects of social capital have been harder to measure. Chetty and his colleagues came up with ways to do so using data from social media companies. It has transformed our understanding of economic mobility — and fundamentally reshapes thinking about the kinds of policies we should pursue to restore the vitality of the American dream for those in poverty.

“This is the single strongest predictor of economic mobility that we or anybody else has identified to date,” Chetty says of social capital that connects low-income people with those higher in the income distribution.

The challenge, he says, is aligning incentives so there is broad support for policies that can restore the promise of the American dream to all.

“Even if you set aside issues of social justice, fairness, and so on that are obviously central, and look at it purely from a cold economic lens of maximizing GDP and growth, you still want to invest in improving opportunity in these areas,” he says of communities of concentrated poverty. Chetty thinks viewing expanded opportunity as “an economic growth policy” is part of the way to bring more people to the table, something that “ultimately lead to change on scale.”

It’s a tall order, but the insights Chetty and his colleagues have provided mean we can no longer throw up our hands and say we don’t know how to tackle the problem. The challenge is mustering the political will to do it.

I sat down with Chetty to better understand the withered state of the American dream and how to revive it at the recent WBUR Festival. What follows is an edited transcript of our discussion. You can also watch the conversation here or listen to it on this episode of The Codcast.

MICHAEL JONAS: Good morning, everyone. I’m really delighted to be here to speak with Raj Chetty this morning on the state of the American dream. Raj Chetty is the William A. Ackman Professor of Economics at Harvard. He’s the founding director of Opportunity Insights, a research center focused on the issues of the American dream and economic mobility that we’ll be talking about. He’s won numerous awards and accolades, including a MacArthur genius grant. He was the recipient of the Clark Medal for most promising young economist under 40. He was a little eager, so he won it at age 33.

Above and beyond all of that, he’s really known today as the preeminent scholar of the American dream and issues around economic mobility in the United States. Part of the reason I’m so excited to be here and to be able to talk to Raj is that I’m not sure there’s a more pressing issue that we’ve faced going back now several decades. Angst around the issues of economic mobility, this ideal of the American dream that we are taught and told about, has only been mounting. I’m delighted to have Raj here to help us understand what has been happening and what we might do to perhaps change the arc of some of the recent trends.

Raj, I would love to just have you start by telling us how you think about the American dream and what your research shows broadly about it today.

RAJ CHETTY: Absolutely. So first, a pleasure to be with you here this morning, Michael, and with all of you. I want to start by just agreeing with your premise — that I think ideas of the American dream, whether America is a land of opportunity, these are really some of the central challenges of our time, in my opinion. If we think about how to define the American dream, there are many different aspects to it. But one cornerstone aspect of it, which I think has been part of this country’s vision since its founding 250 years ago, is the idea that through hard work, any child should have the chance to move up in the income distribution relative to their parents. It was that sort of idea that drew my own parents to come to this country, countless other immigrants, and so on.

I think, unfortunately, that aspiration is slipping out of reach in this country. So I want to start, Michael, just by illustrating that with this chart here that you will see on the TV screens, which shows you this particular way of thinking about the American dream, from some data my colleagues and I put together a few years ago, where we just asked the simple question, what fraction of children go on to earn more than their parents did? So trying to quantify that canonical definition of the American dream. And what you can see here is that for kids born back in the middle of the last century, back in 1940, it was a virtual guarantee that you were going to achieve the American dream of moving up. We estimate that 92 percent of children born in 1940 went on to earn more than their parents did after adjusting for inflation, measuring both kids and parents’ incomes in their mid-30s.

But if you look at what has happened over time, you can see that there’s been a dramatic fading of the American dream, such that for children born in 1990 who are turning 30 around now, when we’re measuring their incomes as adults, it’s become essentially a 50-50 shot, a coin flip, as to whether you’re going to achieve the American dream. Coming back to your introduction, I think this is fundamental to understanding what’s happening in the United States. It’s, of course, of fundamental economic interest. I think it’s also of fundamental social and political interest, because it’s this very trend that’s underlying a lot of the frustration that people around America are expressing — that this is no longer a country where it’s easy to get ahead.

JONAS: The chart powerfully tells a story that I think many people can probably relate to. I think people have come to see that playing out in younger generations and what they’re up against. But I’m also struck that if the measure is doing a little better than your parents, and if that has really decreased, that’s particularly punishing if your parents were on the lower rungs. The injuries of that are just profound. And so I think in trying to understand what’s going on, especially with people who are in families of not great means, and the ability of those children to rise up out of it, your research team has done some really amazing work that has, I think, uncovered that although we see this trend nationally, it doesn’t play out evenly and that there’s really pretty strong variation. Can you just talk a little bit about that, and in doing that, I think also it’s just worth people understanding the ways you and your team have been able to go at so many of these questions with the availability of data that just simply wasn’t around. These questions just were kind of unknowable a few decades ago.

CHETTY: That’s exactly right. Just starting from where you ended there, the research team that I direct, Opportunity Insights, one way to think about our goals is to understand what’s driving the fading of the American dream that you’re seeing here. But more importantly — what I suspect all of us here are interested in — what can we do to create more economic opportunity going forward for everyone, especially people at the lower end of the income distribution? And we are by no means the only group of scholars studying these questions. People have been interested in these issues for decades. As Michael noted, our angle on it is to use the tools of modern big data, much as you see in the private sector companies using large scale data to improve the products they offer. Our vision is that in the age of data, we can use large data sets to better understand important economic and social policy questions, like, how can we increase upward economic mobility?

Now a key thing that that large-scale data allows us to do is, exactly as you said, disaggregate this national picture that we’re starting out with and look at how it varies across areas of the United States across subgroups. And that turns out to be very powerful in understanding what is going on here. So just to show you that, I’m going to turn to this map, which gives you that geographic breakdown.

Let me just take a second to describe how we constructed this map and then tell you what I think we learned from it. What we’re looking at is a map of the geography of economic opportunity, or upward mobility, in the United States. What we’ve done is taken data on 20 million children, essentially all children born in the early 1980s in the United States, use information from anonymized tax returns to link those kids back to their parents and back to the exact area in which they grew up. We then divide the US into 740 different metro and rural areas. And in each of those areas, we calculate a very simple measure of upward mobility. We ask, suppose your parents were at the 25th percentile of the national income distribution, which corresponds to having an income of about $40,000 a year, at present. Say you grew up in such a family. How much are you, yourself earning when we follow you over time and look at your 1040 income tax return when you’re 35 years old?

To give you an example, for the kids who grew up in the Boston Metro area, if they grew up in families making about $40,000 a year, they are, on average, making about $55,000 a year when we look at them in their mid-30s. So we similarly compute that statistic for every other metro and rural area in the US, and we color the map so that the green colors are places where people are more likely to rise up and achieve the American dream, and the red colors are places where, if you’re born to a low-income family, you, you have poorer outcomes, on average. So if you start by just looking at the scale in the lower right hand side of this map, you can see there’s an enormous amount of variation in children’s chances of rising up. So look at Dubuque, Iowa, for example, or much of the rural Midwest. Kids growing up in families making $40,000 a year, on average, one generation later are making 70 or even $75,000 a year, substantial upward mobility in a single generation. All adjusted for inflation. Yet you have other places — look at Charlotte, North Carolina — kids starting out in families at that exact same income level of $40,000 a year, one generation later in their mid-30s, they’re actually not even making as much as their parents were, which is shocking if you think about the amount of economic growth that’s occurred in America over the past 30 years.

JONAS: And Charlotte’s been touted as this kind of shining star of the Southeast economy, right?

CHETTY: That’s exactly right. Charlotte was a particularly striking example to us because when we first put out these data, about 10 years ago, Charlotte actually ranked 50th out of the 50 largest American cities in terms of your odds of rising up, which people there were very surprised by. If you look at other data on average incomes in Charlotte, the number of high paying jobs, the growth of the city, you just drove around the city, you would see that it’s dramatically richer today than it was 30 years ago. The finance sector is booming, the tech sector is booming, and so on. But you might think, OK, isn’t that contradictory with what you’re saying here, that Charlotte is a place where it’s not easy to rise up? Well, it turns out, if you look deeper at the data, what’s happening is that Charlotte is basically importing talent. People are moving to Charlotte to get high paying jobs at firms like Bank of America, which is headquartered in Charlotte. But apparently, and this is what you see in these data where we’re following kids over time, if you grew up in Charlotte in a low-income family, that doesn’t guarantee prosperity for you. And so it shows us that we need to think more deeply about what’s driving this variation to really understand how to help people come up.

JONAS: You talked about what you would see when you drill down on Charlotte. I know we’ve got some data on Boston and communities in Massachusetts, which will naturally be of particular interest to folks here. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how this plays out [here] more granularly.

CHETTY: The first thing we realized is the picture starting at the national level varies greatly across regions. And so here your eye gravitates towards the Midwest or the Southeast. But what we next realized is, actually, the variation emerges at a much more local level than that. I’m going to show you the data right here in the Boston metro area. Here we’re looking at the exact same statistics, but now we’ve divided every place in America into census tracts. Every census tract has about 4,000 people in it. So there are 70,000 census tracts in America. Think of this as like a fine definition of neighborhoods, where we’ve split up the different parts of Boston, Cambridge, et cetera, into, into different neighborhoods.

If you’re born to a family at the 25th percentile, where do you yourself end up in the income distribution, depending upon where you grew up? And the first thing to notice here is just a very simple observation, but turns out to be an important one, which is that the spectrum of colors that you’re looking at in this map, zoomed into Boston, is the same as the spectrum of colors that you were seeing in the national map a second ago. So you can go from the deepest reds to the darkest blue-greens just within [Greater] Boston. If you look at, for instance, Roxbury versus parts of Cambridge or Chelsea, you see very different outcomes. And so what it’s telling you is, you can drive two miles down the road in Boston, and it’s like you’re going from Alabama to Iowa in terms of your chances of achieving the American dream.

That is true in Boston, it’s true in cities across America. If you’re interested in zooming into the neighborhood of where you live, you can go to this website called the Opportunity Atlas [opportunityatlas.org], type in your home address, and look up these kinds of statistics for whatever area you’re interested in. And what you learn is that the origins of these differences are hyperlocal. So it’s not about state level differences in policies. Is Massachusetts doing something different from Texas or California? I mean, obviously it is, but that’s apparently not the key driver of these differences. Often it’s about what’s happening on one side of the street versus the other side of the street within the same city. And let me just note, here we’ve shown some of the data for Boston, just for illustration. Same thing is true [if] you look at many of the other cities in Massachusetts. Lots of variation within Brockton, within Worcester, Lynn, and so on.

JONAS: The question that this sort of all begs is, what do we think is going on here? What do you think are the factors that jump out as ones that might explain some of this variation?

CHETTY: The way I think about it as a scientist is that, effectively, these data give us a new tool to understand the science of economic opportunity, a microscope, if you will, to drill down and ask what’s different about the south side of Boston versus other parts of Boston? What happens when a kid moves from one of these red colored areas in Brockton to one of the green colored areas? And so with that kind of analysis, we and others over the past decade now have written hundreds of papers using the Opportunity Atlas data that our team has put out to really try to understand what is driving these differences in outcomes across places. Let me highlight here the four strongest factors that people have identified as drivers of differences in economic mobility at this local level.

The first is poverty rates. So places with lower poverty rates, more mixed-income communities tend to be places where you’re more likely to rise up and achieve the American dream. So basically, integration is correlated with better outcomes for poor kids. Second, a strong pattern in the data is that places with more stable family structures, more two-parent families, for example, tend to be places with higher levels of upward mobility. Third, as you might expect, intuitively, places with better schools, both at the K through 12 level and in terms of access to higher education, tend to be places where you’re more likely to rise up. And then finally, places with greater social capital tend to be places with higher levels of upward mobility. People have used it to mean things like the strength of a community, how closely tied people are to different sorts of people. It’s been a bit nebulous and hard to measure. But as I think we’ll get into in greater detail in a second, in my view, this is one of the most important factors in driving these differences across areas.

JONAS: This issue of social capital is one that, as you say, people are familiar with. In the sort of popular literature, the thing that might be most associated with it is the book by your Harvard colleague Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone. Robert Putnam really exposed this idea that something has changed in American society over the last few decades in terms of this thing called social capital. But he wasn’t able to sort of drill down and measure it as well as we might like. I was sort of struck, when you look at the first three [factors you list] — those are ones that I feel people in your field would gravitate toward because you can measure poverty rates pretty readily, family structure, the others. I guess the question this all raises is, we understand, however you define it, that this thing called social capital seems important. But how do we go about quantifying it and bringing it into these constructs that you and your colleagues have so elegantly put together around income and other, other variables?

CHETTY: So you’re exactly right that, in economics, people are very oriented towards measuring things precisely. As you’ve seen here, with the tax record data, we can measure people’s incomes and life outcomes in various ways precisely. As we were doing this work, you can kind of see the research process here start to identify some of these factors that we can measure well, like poverty rates and things about schools and so on. We saw those seem to be playing an important role. But I had been reading the work of Bob Putnam, talking with him down the hall at Harvard, and had the sense, just introspecting, that social capital — who you’re connected to, who you’re influenced by — might be very important. I began to think, how can we bring a similar approach to rigorous measurement and quantification to social capital, trying to understand people’s networks and who they’re interacting with? Again, living in the age of data, what does one think of? We have large-scale social network data from the many social networks that people now use. We reached out and set up a collaboration with the Facebook data science team to construct measures of social capital for every ZIP code in America using Facebook data on 72 million users of Facebook, between the ages of 25 and 44, which is kind of the sweet spot of Facebook usage at the moment.

What came out of that is a set of different measures of social capital that we constructed. I’m going to highlight one of them.

This pair of maps really tells the key story. So the map on the left in this slide is the same map that I started out with of upward mobility, constructed using tax data here shown at the county level where the green colors are places where you’re more likely to rise up, the red colors are places where you’re less likely to rise up. The map on the right looks visually similar but is completely different. It’s a map constructed using Facebook data that measures the extent to which low-income people interact with high-income people across counties in America. So we’re constructing a very simple measure. We’re asking, suppose you have below median income, what fraction of your Facebook friends have above median income? In the map on the right, the blue colors are places where low-income people have more high-income friends, and the red colors are places with more disconnection by class. It’s completely obvious what the result is. The map on the right is incredibly similar to the map on the left. This is the single strongest predictor of economic mobility that we or anybody else has identified to date. In the places like rural Iowa or parts of Massachusetts where low-income people are more likely to be connected to high income people, they’re also more likely to rise out of poverty.

Now in our ongoing work, we’re digging deeper into why this is. It turns out this is not just a correlation. This is actually a causal effect. If by chance you end up being connected to more high-income people, we’re able to show that that translates to higher college attendance rates down the road, higher levels of income, higher career success. Why exactly that is, we’re working on figuring out. I think there are a couple of very plausible mechanisms. One is that networks are incredibly important for career advancement in the United States. So just kind of at a mechanical level, more than half of jobs are obtained through referrals. So if you’re more connected to someone who has a higher paying job, maybe you get an internship, maybe you get an opportunity that allows you to advance in your career.

But I think the deeper, more important mechanism is that people’s aspirations are shaped by who they see around them. If you’ve never met anyone who’s gone to college, who’s gone to a career in business or journalism or science, you don’t even think of that as a possibility for yourself. I think in some of the neighborhoods we were seeing in Boston, parts of Roxbury or Dorchester, and the maps that I was showing earlier, kids there may have very different aspirations, even though they have the same talent as kids in other parts of the city. And we’re seeing that borne out very clearly in the data.

JONAS: When you say people can be strongly influenced by the examples around them, maybe it’s not coincidental that your father is an economist.

CHETTY: That’s right. So I come from a family of academics. I’m the last person in my family to publish a paper after my parents and older sisters. So very much influenced in that way by the environment I’ve grown up in.

JONAS: This question of connection — I think people will respond [by] nodding their heads. People, in their everyday lives, see that play out all the time. Whether you’ve been able to help a friend’s kid with an internship, or your child has had that sort of a benefit, these are things that are accepted as part of everyday life among people with more social capital. We’ve assumed this is important. What’s so striking is that you say it’s not just an important variable, but it really swamps, frankly, the other ones that economists have sort of drilled down on and been able to measure so well for years.

CHETTY: Let me underscore that. I think economic factors are incredibly important, but this made clear to me that my colleagues in sociology, the things that they had been thinking about for many years, sociological factors like this are equally, if not more, important in many cases for determining economic outcomes. Let me give you an example of a result that I was particularly struck by in this context. So there’s a long literature showing that more unequal countries, or more unequal places within a country, like within the United States, at a given point in time, are also places where it’s harder to rise up across generations. So societies with a lot of income inequality also tend to be societies with very little intergenerational economic mobility the way we’re measuring it here. And for a long time people thought that that was about economic forces, that people from lower-income backgrounds may not have as many resources in that context and so on. What we actually find is that the key mechanism appears to be related to what we’re seeing here, which is that more unequal places are also more places that are more disconnected, as measured in the Facebook data along class lines. High-income people tend to be interacting less with low-income people. Think of the extreme version of gated communities, where high-income people are living in completely different places with no interaction with lower-income folks. And then that really fully explains why kids from lower-income families are less likely to rise up in more unequal societies. So it’s another example where this factor really seems central in understanding economic phenomena.

JONAS: I’m really struck by the degree to which you and your team have been able to again, amass data and bring evidence to bear on a lot of strands of work that, as you say, so much of knowledge is iterative and builds on other work that has been done by others. Including Bob Putnam. I’m [also] thinking of the great sociologist William Julius Wilson [and his work focusing on] what happens within inner city communities and in particular to Black men. He talked a lot about the isolation that is part of what fuels those cycles of poverty. Another way of describing that is a lack of social capital of the kind that connects people outside of that world to other possibilities, for work and other opportunities.

CHETTY: All of these findings are very consistent with the work of William Julius Wilson and what happens when jobs disappear in parts of cities, often African American communities [are] severely affected by that. One thing I want to underscore is, it’s not just about isolation of a physical sense, but interaction that’s really key. So a lot of you may know that there’s discussion constantly, but especially recently, here in Massachusetts — how can we better integrate our schools, for example? And I think integration can be very valuable. That’s of course part of what we are seeing in these maps. But what we’re seeing in the Facebook data is that simple integration, simply having low- and high-income kids go to the same school in and of itself is not helpful and may even be harmful if it does not lead to friendship between low- and high-income people. That is, interaction is key. Integration is the first step towards interaction, but integration without interaction does not produce the goals we’re aiming for.

JONAS: Address a question some people may have. Are you saying a key for lower-income people is to find better-off people. They are somehow better and they will, you know, sprinkle some magic mobility dust on them. I think people can be made a little uncomfortable by this very idea.

CHETTY: So I think of it less as, some people are better and other people are not. That’s not the right way to think about the mechanism here. I think it is related to the two things we were talking about earlier. The nature of the structure of our economy and our society, where things like referrals can matter for getting opportunities. That’s going to create a situation where if you have these connections, that can matter. But more importantly, I think of it as shifting what people see as the possibilities for themselves. So as another piece of data that I think is informative here, we see that women are much more likely to become scientists if they grow up in an area where there are a lot of female inventors, as measured by patent data. But if they’re more male inventors in exactly the same place, it has no impact on the rate at which women go into science. So I think it’s about seeing someone who you can emulate, someone you can see following in their path. That’s what really makes a difference. One way to achieve that is to create more of this sort of integration, but there might be other lessons that we can learn about — mentoring programs, about the way we set up schools, other supports that we offer that deliver the same mechanism without just being around higher-income people.

JONAS: Talk briefly about some of the research that has tried to look at what happens when we change some of these variables. What happens when people are able to move from an area of low opportunity to a higher high opportunity?

CHETTY: Yeah, absolutely. The way I think about it is, we’ve talked so far about what the drivers are of these differences in economic mobility across places. The next question where our team’s focused at the moment is, well, what do you do given all this understanding? How can we increase economic opportunity for people in a concrete way at the end of the day? One direct solution you might think of is what Michael just brought up — of helping people move to these higher opportunity areas, if I show you a few miles down the road in Boston, there are better opportunities to be had. We spend about $70 billion per year in the United States — [the] federal government — on various affordable housing policies that are intended to give people access to better housing, possibly in better neighborhoods. Are there ways we can use that money more effectively to help more families achieve better outcomes?

And I think the answer is yes. We’ve done a series of studies where either through randomized pilot interventions or studying families that move across neighborhoods, we find that if you help families move from one of these red colored areas to a nearby blue-green colored area, you see quite significant improvements in their kids’ outcomes. You can do that, for example, through housing vouchers, which about two and a half million families in the US currently get — basically rental subsidies to potentially get housing in better areas. One thing to note from a policy perspective is that it’s not enough to just give a family a voucher and say, now you can move to a higher opportunity area, good luck. Go find that on your own. We actually find that if you simply give families the financial support and don’t provide any additional assistance, they end up living in the lower opportunity places in the city.

This is true in Boston, this is true in cities across America. What we then found, however, is if in a randomized trial, we offered families what I think of as essentially social capital in the housing search process — someone who acted as sort of a broker helped them find housing in a higher opportunity neighborhood, negotiate with landlords, found listings for them, help them navigate the process — that dramatically changed where families chose to live and can dramatically improve their children’s outcomes down the road. So I do think that is one way to tackle these problems.

JONAS: The converse of that, which you’ve done recent work on, is, can we change the red areas of low opportunity, since, as you’ve often said, we’re not going to be able, at scale, to have everyone move to an area of opportunity. There was a recent story in The Boston Globe on research [you and your team carried out] on a federal program that was called Hope VI, that involved knocking down huge public housing developments that were very concentrated areas of poverty and replacing them with mixed income housing. Not only did the low-income people who then moved back in there have neighbors of different income levels, but the nature of that mixed-income development was such that it was not as isolated from the surrounding neighborhood. And so if the neighborhood surrounding it was also one of greater opportunity, there was more of an [interactive] dynamic play among them. All of that is powerful evidence that something can be done.

But the question is, what can we do policy-wise? Can we do it at any scale and are we really mindful enough of what we’re up against? There’s sort of an optimistic story in this, but I’m struck that so many of the things that you’ve identified as barriers to mobility have only become stronger. We’re more stratified than we were. In terms of family structure, there has emerged since the 1950s an enormous divide by income in two-parent households. There is a huge divide in education, so that people are much more likely today to be married and partner with someone of the same education level. So the benefits of having characteristics of higher mobility just compound, and those associated with lower mobility, lower opportunity, similarly are sort of aggregated. You spoke about 10 years ago with an economist on a podcast, and you said, “the current trends suggest that segregation will continue to increase in the US.” That’s one prediction you probably would like to have been wrong about. Here in Massachusetts, people may have noticed just 10 days ago a lawsuit was filed against the state based on the charge that our school districts are profoundly segregated by race and income. And that the charges that this violates the state constitution. The scale of it is, frankly, just kind of overwhelming. We have about 900,000 K-to-12 students in Massachusetts, and roughly a quarter of them, 225,000, are in very segregated districts. We now understand ways that that’s holding back those kids. So how do we begin to combat that or kind of push the needle in the other direction?

CHETTY: So let me say a couple of things. Our recent Hope VI research shows that it is possible to turn these red colored communities into green colored areas. And I think we need to do more work in that vein. It’s about reinvesting in communities that create mixed-income areas that facilitate this sort of interaction and appear to dramatically change kids’ lives. Second, you noted how a lot of these factors have grown worse over time. Income segregation has grown, divides in education have grown, and so on. And I just want to tie that back to the very first chart that we started out with on the fading American dream. It’s exactly those kinds of shifts that led to that declining trend to begin with. And so that underscores the importance of tackling these problems. And then to the third question of what can we do? Well, the good news is we increasingly are able to clearly identify in the data programs like Hope VI, housing voucher policies, changes in the K-through-12 school system, investments in highly effective workforce training programs. For instance, here in Boston, there was a program called Year Up, that some of you may know that was started here, that shows very positive impacts in terms of changing people’s career trajectories, connecting them to better jobs and so on.

There are many interventions that I think we can pinpoint that would really change this narrative significantly. The deep challenge, in my view, from an economic point of view, is how do you convince people to allocate resources to tackle these problems when there’s no direct economic incentive for themselves? So the private market by itself is not going to necessarily solve this problem. But I think the case we need to make very clear is that there’s an enormous economic benefit for all of us if we turn those red colored areas into green colored areas.

We refer to a phenomenon in our research that we call “lost Einsteins.” There are lots of kids who could go on to become inventors, entrepreneurs who would contribute new technologies, new businesses that would benefit all of us, who are being left behind because we’re not giving them opportunities. And so even if you set aside issues of social justice, fairness, and so on that are obviously central, and look at it purely from a cold economic lens of maximizing GDP and growth, you still want to invest in improving opportunity in these areas. And so I think viewed from that lens as kind of an economic growth policy, my hope is that we can bring more people to the table and we’re actually doing work now to try to develop that in a very direct way and see if we can harness private capital to really invest in programs that are effective. So I think it’s that kind of thinking that hopefully will ultimately lead to change on scale.

JONAS: I’m going to get to some of the [audience] questions. One person is asking if you can talk a little bit about race and gender in regard to mobility data.

CHETTY: Absolutely. So if you go to the Opportunity Atlas, you can click on toggles that will allow you to look at these maps separately by race and by gender. So you can look at Black folks in Boston, white women, Black women, Hispanic folks, et cetera. What you will see is that there are very sharp differences in economic mobility by race, even within a given neighborhood. Black kids growing up in families at a given income level have significantly poorer chances of rising up than white kids. That may not surprise you, given what you know about the historical narrative of the United States. What is surprising, perhaps, is that that interacts very strongly with gender. So it turns out, if you look at Black boys versus white boys growing up in families at the same income level, they have dramatically different prospects. White boys are much more likely to rise up than Black boys. But if you look at Black girls versus white girls, their outcomes are practically identical in terms of income, in terms of education, conditional on starting and families at the same level of income. So in order to understand why racial disparities persist so deeply in the United States, you really need to understand why, in particular, Black men have limited opportunities relative to white men. It relates to some of the factors that we’ve talked about here, as well as other challenges that need to be addressed.

JONAS: Someone else asked about — on this theme of subgroups — of immigrants versus native-born Americans. I have to say, I was struck in the maps showing the [local] region, at the green in Chelsea, which is a high immigrant population community, but seemed to show quite a bit of mobility.

CHETTY: Immigrants, both presently and in the past, have much higher rates of upward mobility than people born in the United States. And that is true pretty much irrespective of what country you immigrated from. So contrary to maybe some of the public narrative, immigrants, their kids especially, do exceptionally well in terms of rates of upward mobility. Now, when you dig deeper into why that is, and there’s been some nice work done by scholars at Stanford and Princeton on this named Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, [and] they show that a significant reason that immigrant families do better in terms of upward mobility is that they choose to locate in the neighborhoods that give their kids the best prospects of rising up. So you can think of this intuitively as, if you come as an immigrant to the US — and I can relate to this from my own family’s personal experience — the goal really is achieving the American dream. So you try to buy the smallest house in the best school district, and everything is oriented towards helping kids rise up, and that plays out in the data.

JONAS: In Massachusetts, the lawsuit around segregation points that out. If you cross the street and go a block or so [from here], you’re in Brookline, which is, if you look at a map, wedged into Boston. The district boundaries here are such that you can be in a school in one place and then three blocks away you’d have a completely different opportunity. And the suit is saying, we really have isolated poor kids using these district boundaries, which I think people are very reluctant to bring more permeability to. Do need to think bigger or differently about things like that if we’re really going make a dent in all of this? We need housing that’s more affordable, especially in communities of higher opportunity. We’ve seen this play out in the last few years. It’s resisted very strongly by communities. We know what we need to do, but all these forces and actions are pushing against opportunity being extended more broadly.

CHETTY: I think we have to think fundamentally about incentives. So I may abstractly be in favor of integration and mixing and so on, but not in my own backyard because I’m worried about my own kids. I find two pieces of evidence important to keep in mind in that context. So first, we’ve been emphasizing how folks who have less opportunity at the moment, lower-income backgrounds, can benefit from more cross-class interaction. People often ask me, well, what about the kids of people on the other end of the spectrum? How are my kids, if I’m from a higher-income family, going to be affected in this more integrated environment if the lawsuit passes, et cetera. And interestingly, you find a strong asymmetry there. So when you’re in a more integrated, connected community, kids from low-income backgrounds do better. Kids from high-income backgrounds, there’s a maybe a small negative effect on their outcomes, but it’s very small, or none at all.

So what I would emphasize is that it’s not a zero-sum game. It’s not that the people at the lower end of the distribution gain at the expense of more affluent kids. Actually, you can help people come up without having negative impacts at the top, which I think is just an important fact to get out there publicly and convey that in the public narrative. The second thing that I think is very important is to come back to the point that we all stand to gain. When society’s more productive, we have fewer people who have health problems, who are incarcerated. That’s less expense for taxpayers. Even more affluent people gain in the end when we make these investments. A key thing to figure out is how we actually make that connection very direct so that people see it and feel it themselves. I think that could then lead to sustained support for the types of policies we’ve been discussing.

JONAS: And I think part of the way that people will see it more is through the work that you and your team are doing to shine a light on all these issues. Thank you, Raj Chetty, so much for a wonderful conversation.

CHETTY: Thank you.

JONAS: And thank you all for coming.