Changing Opportunity: A Q&A with Raj Chetty, 2024 Arrow Lecturer on Ethics and Leadership

Raj Chetty is the William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics at Harvard University and the Director of Opportunity Insights. We were honored to have the opportunity to ask Dr. Chetty a few questions about the power of economics to inspire change ahead of his 2024 Arrow Lecture on Wednesday, March 13.

Big data is a foundation of your research because of the massive, structured data sets required to reveal real trends over time. The era of big data is more than 10 years old now, and rapid advances in machine learning in the last five years have ushered in a new era of data analytics. What’s unique about your methodologies in this new study that perhaps wasn’t possible when analyzing previous data sets?

Big data is often thought about in relation to large private sector companies using troves of data to make better business investments and tailor products to their consumers’ tastes. In our team’s research at Opportunity Insights, we take this same kind of big data approach to understand the trends and factors contributing to (or hindering) economic opportunity. Analogous to biologists when they began using microscopes to study cellular biology, big data is giving us a new lens through which we can understand the science of economic opportunity with unprecedented precision and granularity. We are able to literally “zoom in” to the neighborhood level and investigate why opportunity varies sharply across areas – pinpointing results such as the causal effect of growing up in an environment with more cross-class interaction on children’s outcomes in adulthood.

The fading of the American Dream is a useful concept that you’ve used to talk about social (im)mobility in the 21st century. With the hope of restoring the American Dream, your research has prompted innovation and change in federal and state policy, urban and architectural design, and education reform. What approach do you hope citizens and lawmakers will take to address mobility?

The multifaceted nature of what contributes to mobility necessitates an equally multifaceted policy approach. Our research has pointed to specific policy levers that contribute to moving the needle on upward mobility, including: 1) how housing and community development policy can be improved to increase low-income children's access to high-opportunity areas, 2) place-based efforts that work to improve opportunities for low-income residents where they live through building stronger, more diverse social networks and through improved job training and mentorship programs to boost adult earnings, and 3) how access to high-quality college education and admissions policies within these kinds of institutions can be adapted to broaden low-income student access and improve mobility.

A broad theme cutting across all these areas is that combining investments in human and financial capital – which have been the focus of much existing policy – with investments in social capital makes programs much more effective. Housing vouchers are more effective in helping families move to opportunity areas when families are given support in the housing search process by counselors. Job training programs are more effective when individuals are provided with networks and support in connecting with employers. Programs targeted at improving outcomes in colleges are most effective when they have tailored support to help individuals apply to and graduate from college. Going forward, a focus not just on resources allocated to various programs but on how those programs are delivered and how individuals are supported in using these programs appears to be critical.

How do you reflect on your corpus of research at this point in your career? What were the questions that drove your interests at the beginning that may be different from the curiosities that drive you now?

I was interested in issues related to inequality, poverty, and opportunity from a young age – even if I didn’t anticipate using the tools of economics to study them. My parents grew up in low-income families in South India. They were fortunate to get access to education that provided them pathways to come to the United States and find opportunities for themselves and me and my two sisters. I have been keenly aware of the luck that our family had in these opportunities and have been interested in understanding how, as a society, we can distribute those opportunities more widely and fairly.

While these overarching questions that drove my interests early in my career continue to be my focus now, the specific directions my work has taken have, of course, changed. I began to see the value of large-scale data in studying these questions over time, and in light of what we found there, my focus has turned toward factors such as the role of social communities and networks in shaping outcomes – issues that I had not anticipated working on early in my career. What I enjoy about science is following the path wherever it leads in the search of truth, with the aim of ultimately improving people’s lives.

One of the legacies of Dr. Kenneth Arrow’s work (The Arrow Lecture Series on Ethics and Leadership honors the late Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow) is the idea that economics is a moral science: a means to improve the well-being of humans. Your empirical methods and research findings have repeatedly demonstrated the power of moral science to make inequality visible and to mobilize systemic change. What role should economics play in the lives of students, citizens, lawmakers, and teachers today?

Ken Arrow did foundational work in showing how a better understanding of economic theory could improve people’s lives. Inspired by his example (in a literal sense – I have a photo of Dr. Arrow that I look up to above my desk), my colleagues and I hope to show how analysis of modern data can also help us make scientific progress in improving human well-being. 

For example, creating widespread awareness of how economic mobility and other life outcomes differ in our society – by race, gender, parent income, and so on – is imperative to creating a more just and productive society where everyone has a fair shot of succeeding.

As we think about translating our research at Opportunity Insights, we tend to focus on developing solutions where policy and lawmakers play a pivotal role in order to have impact on scale. However, there are many other ways to leverage the research and economic principles for positive social change. For the public, being informed about the data on economic mobility can inspire civic engagement for policies and programs that the evidence suggests can improve opportunity within one’s own community and beyond. For students and teachers, understanding economics can foster a culture of critical thinking that can be applicable across many facets of life and help inspire a new generation of leaders.

As the Director of Opportunity Insights, you use big data to study the science of economic opportunity: how we can give children from all backgrounds better chances of succeeding. How do you go about communicating about data to portray its humanity? Why is it important to avoid conceptualizing and communicating about data as an abstraction, purely numerical in nature?

Although our work at Opportunity Insights is grounded in quantitative analyses of big data, we collaborate with other scholars to implement a wide spectrum of other methods – ranging from qualitative research to direct engagement with local leaders and community members to the formulation of new theories – to deepen our scientific understanding and sharpen the ways in which our research can create meaningful policy change.

For instance, in our housing mobility work in Seattle, WA, we complemented the quantitative experimental data that showed an increased likelihood of low-income families moving to opportunity neighborhoods with hundreds of program participant interviews to understand the underlying features that contributed to the success of this initiative. This process uncovered program design features that strongly influenced subsequent replication efforts nationally, such as HUD’s Community Choice Demonstration Program, which scaled the Seattle CMTO model across eight U.S. cities.

We also work hard to build relationships with local leaders and organizations working to improve mobility outcomes across the country. These partnerships give us important insight into how the data is received, what questions communities have, and the ways the evidence is being applied to support mobility solutions. We see this in communities like Charlotte, NC, that have used the evidence to catalyze and coordinate community resources and efforts to address low mobility outcomes in their region.

We believe that bringing these “real world” examples alive in conjunction with numerical data is critical for people to be inspired by the rich, personal stories represented in each of the millions of data points in our studies. And in the social sciences, nothing is more critical to foster change in society than sparking that inspiration. 

Raj Chetty’s 2024 Arrow Lecture, “Changing Opportunity: Sociological Foundations of Economic Mobility,” will take place on Wednesday, March 13, 2024, from 4:30 - 6 p.m. PST at the Oberndorf Event Center (Room N302A) in the Knight Management Center. A short reception will follow.

Elizabeth Bennett writes about social justice and climate change for mission-driven organizations. She lives in southern California with her husband, son, and a menagerie of adopted animals.