Raj Chetty's Discussions with Maya

Maya Ajmera, President & CEO of the Society for Science and Executive Publisher of Science News, had a conversation with Raj Chetty, an alumnus of the 1997 Science Talent Search (STS) and the 1997 International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF). Chetty is the William A. Ackman Professor of Economics at Harvard, a MacArthur Fellow and founder of Opportunity Insights, an institute dedicated to using big data to improve upward mobility out of poverty. Recently, Chetty joined the Society’s Honorary Board and sat down for a fireside chat hosted by the Society with Ajmera. An edited version of their conversation is shared here.

Chetty grew up in New Delhi, India, until he was 9 years old and then moved to the United States with his parents. As an immigrant, he saw the U.S. as a land of opportunity, which has shaped his perspective and interest in issues of inequality, social mobility, and opportunity. This, in part, inspired his research into what factors lead people to pursue careers in science and innovation. Chetty found that there are many “lost Einsteins” in America, women and those from minoritized or low-income groups who could have made significant discoveries if they had been exposed to innovation as children.

Chetty has vivid memories of participating in ISEF and STS. During the summers and after school, he had the opportunity to work in a microbiology lab at the Medical College of Wisconsin where he conducted his research project. At ISEF, he was struck by the experience of seeing students from different parts of the U.S. engaging in a variety of exciting activities. Chetty’s experience in high school working in research and participating in ISEF cultivated his interest in research and the types of questions he focuses on today.

Chetty was interested in statistical analysis of the data he was generating and was drawn to economics and social science due to his love for math and statistics. It was later in his career that Chetty discovered the potential of big data to study questions that he and others had been thinking about for decades. He found surprising results when examining data on children from anonymized tax return data. Growing up in the U.S. in a low-income family provides little opportunity to enter the middle class or beyond. Chetty discovered that opportunities are very different depending on where you live and the color of your skin.

While white Americans growing up in middle class families in certain communities have great outcomes, even white kids don’t have great chances of rising up in much of the Southeast and many cities in the industrial Midwest. For Black kids, and Black boys in particular, the American dream is not a reality almost everywhere in the U.S. Chetty is driven to examine what factors explain why kids from low-income families do well in certain parts of Iowa, for example.

Over the years, many sociologists have discussed the idea that it might be about who you’re connected to, who shapes your aspirations, and what your social network looks like. But the problem was we didn’t have a good way to measure social capital empirically. With the advent of online social networks, I started talking with the team at Meta about the possibility of launching a large-scale collaboration between Meta and our research team to study these questions. We were able to use anonymized Facebook social network data on 80 million people and looked at their friendships in the U.S. — 21 billion friendships between them — and constructed very fine-grained measures, zip code by zip code, about the extent to which low- and high-income people were interacting with each other. Connections like these have turned out to be the single strongest predictor of differences in economic mobility that we or anybody else has identified to date.

We found that low-income kids growing up in communities where there is a lot of interaction across class lines have a much better chance of going to college and achieving a higher level of income. It remains to be understood exactly why that is the case, but we think it’s things like being aware of career paths they may not have otherwise considered.

I will go back to my childhood and say Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which in retrospect, I realize is a book about upward mobility. I don’t think I had quite figured that out as a kid.

Knowing that the pandemic has made all the issues that we’re studying only worse. Finding solutions to these problems is all the more imperative with that in mind. Not just because the American dream in and of itself is important, but also because it has very important political implications. Democracy itself is at risk at the moment because many people feel disenfranchised. I would like to have more answers to the question of what we can do to make a difference. If somebody were to ask me how we can narrow racial disparities or improve outcomes for many low-income kids, I have a couple guesses but don’t really have the answer. I think that lack of scientific understanding prevents us from finding a solution. That’s the kind of thing that I often lie in bed thinking about and what I think makes social science so important and exciting.