Raj Chetty’s American Dream

And the premise may be wrong altogether

https://www.aei.org/publication/a-new-fed-report-suggests-am...

Measuring real growth properly is useful for addressing a host of questions. For example, existing studies use measured inflation to calculate the real income of children relative to their parents. Chetty et al. (2017) find that 50% of children born in 1984 achieved higher incomes than their parents at age 30. Adjusting for missing growth would raise the real income of children about 17% relative to their parents, increasing the fraction of those who do better than their parents by a meaningful amount. Thus, to the extent that inflation is overstated due to imputed values, a larger fraction of children appear to be better off economically than their parents. This improvement in economic welfare can shine a bit more positive light on current conditions, despite the gloom of slower productivity growth.

The interstate highway system cut neighborhoods in half and let people drive right through them. it didn't bring people to them -- better local infrastructure would do that and that's been systematically underfunded for decades.

Chetty is regressing against the wrong thing, which is pretty typical for economists, who mostly seem to be political ideologues armed with least squares fitting and dumb models.

He's basically suggesting school busing on a societal level, and we all know how well that turned out.

I laughed at this. Yes, this is what basically every economist suggests because of the way questions are posed (i.e. confusing correlation with causation...if all great salesman wear Rolexes, just buy all your bad salesman Rolexes...it is so simple, how did these simple-minded, non-rigorous managers not realise this!?).

Political scientists (actually, this is more policy work...where I am this is done within politics) have been looking at these questions for decades. And, about thirty or forty years ago now, they discovered that historical contingency is very important. You can't just import policies from somewhere else, you can't just move people to where the successful people are...there is other stuff going on. Unfortunately, as economists can't measure these things, they remain wholly (and often wilfully) ignorant of these points.

Economists seem - boosted no doubt by laudatory articles about how precocious they were as a child - to have infinite self-confidence. Decades of research on a topic? Irrelevant. "Did you know I have tenure?". "Did you know I use lots of equations in my research? That makes me a scientist you know...rigour!".

It is also baffling that someone chose to write an article about someone failing to do any significant research (particularly as so much research already exists on this topic). Perhaps doing useful research matters far less than telling everyone that you are just about to do something important...just around the corner...did you know when I got tenure btw? Very young. I am genius. I was a very smart child. Look at this photo I have of myself holding a piece of chalk when I was a child...just around the corner...

The article does touch on the answer to your question

> Chetty’s pitch to the nation is that our problems have technocratic solutions, but at times I sense that he is avoiding an argument. Surely our neighborhoods can be improved, and those improvements can help the next generation achieve better outcomes. But what of the larger forces driving the enormous disparities in American wealth? Poor people would be better off if their children had better prospects, but also if they had more money—if the fruits of our society were shared more broadly. “I can take money from you and give it to me, and maybe that is good and maybe it is not,” he said. “I feel like there are a lot of people working on redistribution, and it is hard to figure out the right answer there.” To focus on the question of who gets what is also, of course, politically incendiary.

In less words: this is the just-world theory.

If this is true, why have chemists' earnings dropped so precipitiously following the 2008 recession? Their genetic makeup hasn't changed. What gives?!

To paraphrase Keynes: as time (t) => infinity, we're all dead.

We don't live our lives in a society at the end of the long run, we live our lives in a society that exists here and now. Social mobility might end up at zero in a thousand years (or ten thousand years, or a hundred thousand years) but here and now we can make real people's lives better.

Amusingly, Raj Chetty himself has excellent genetics and inherited his ability. He is from an extremely high achieving family as the article states: "In 1962, Anbu married Veerappa Chetty, a brilliant man from Tamil Nadu whose mother and grandmother had sometimes eaten less food so there would be more for him. Anbu became a doctor and supported her husband while he earned a doctorate in economics. By 1979, when Raj was born in New Delhi, his mother was a pediatrics professor and his father was an economics professor who had served as an adviser to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi"

Also from the article, in keeping with tradition, he married a member of his own caste, the Chettiar. Caste is observably a system for implementing a eugenics program, of which Raj Chetty is a prime example of success. And of course he's continuing the tradition: "[his wife] Sundari is a stem-cell biologist"

>If we acknowledge that evolution is a real thing,

Evolution is real but is much too slow in the face of technology, which augments human abilities.

> skill sets for moving up in society are genetic.

Might be useful here to reference the story of Raj Chetty, whose mother was able to move up in society not merely because of her genetic predisposition, but because someone allowed her to break out of the caste she was born into.

Society is neither monolithic nor static, so cannot be explained as being subject purely to genetics.

In case anyone missed this from your comment:

> If we acknowledge that evolution is a real thing, then we should acknowledge that abilities and skill sets for moving up in society are genetic.

I think that's a big reach. I don't think it's 'self-evident' enough to just put out there like that. Actual evolution involves chance, circumstance, all the time! Genetic bottlenecks, environmental disaster, etc.

> Believeing in evolution without believing that peoples personalities and abilities are predetermined is illogical and nonsensical.

Just wow. I don't even know where to start with this.

> Believeing in evolution without believing that peoples personalities and abilities are predetermined is illogical and nonsensical.

"Believing in computer hardware without believing that all computer behavior is predetermined is nonsensical."