Yes, the Raj Chetty. Here is the transcript and podcast. As far as I can tell, this is the only coverage of Chetty that covers his entire life and career, including his upbringing, his early life, and the evolution of his career, not to mention his taste in music. Here is one bit:
COWEN: Now your father, he’s a well-known economist, and he studied econometrics with Arnold Zellner at University of Wisconsin. At what age did he start talking to you about Bayesian econometrics?
CHETTY: [laughs]
COWEN: Which is one of his fields, right?
CHETTY: That’s right, my dad did a lot of early work in Bayesian econometrics with Arnold Zellner, and the academic environment was something I grew up with since I was a kid. I’m the last person in my family to publish a paper. My sisters are also in academia on the medical and bio side. Whether it’s statistics or thinking about scientific questions or thinking about how to change things in the world, that’s the environment in which I grew up from the youngest of ages.
We also discuss his famous papers on kindergarten teachers, social mobility, and the other topics he is best known for working on, including tax salience and corporate dividends. My favorite part is where Chetty explains what I call “the Raj Chetty production function,” namely why he has been part of so many very successful papers, but that is hard to excerpt. There is also this:
COWEN: In music, the group the Piano Guys, speaking of Mormons. Overrated or underrated?
CHETTY: Underrated. I love the Piano Guys.
COWEN: Why?
CHETTY: I think the Piano Guys are great in terms of doing renditions of popular songs.
COWEN: Not too triumphalist? Do you mean the major chords?
CHETTY: Maybe in some cases, but I like them.
COWEN: Bhindi or okra. Overrated or underrated?…
Self-recommending, if there ever was such a thing.
Best way to eat okra is breaded with cornmeal flour and fried. In my grandmother’s kitchen. But I do not hold it against Prof Chetty for not knowing this. He grew up in Wisconsin.
There are 2 best way to eat okra: Have it chipped and curried together with chicken; cooking it whole in dhal. The timing in both cases is important, so that the okra does not get overcooked.
I don’t understand the notion of eating okra separately.
Interesting interview, i read all of it. That said, the best way to eat okra (the red variety is growing in my garden right now for ornamental value) is to chop it finely, flour it, fry it in curried chicken fat, throw it in the trash and eat something else.
Ok that’s unfair, but I’m still bitter about having ruined so many gumbo recipes with it a decade ago. Slime soup is not tasty!
Okra is best cooked plain. Tablespoon oil with teaspoon cumin and pinch of turmeric and maybe one green chili. Add okra Cut in small pieces and cook over light/medium flame until desired cooked level. Add salt in end.
Okra should not be wet and preferably the variety that is less sticky (they sell it as desi okra in some places). Salt has to be added at end because added in beginning it brings out the water and makes the dish gooey.
Simple and yum
‘Self-recommending, if there ever was such a thing.’
So, you are finally coming around to recognize the absurdity of the phrase ‘self-recommending’? Excellent.
What makes him “THE Raj Chetty”, what makes him better than all Raj Chetties I know? I know lots of Raj Chetties, lots of Raj Chetties are friends of mine, he is no Raj Chetty.
“Yes, the Raj Chetty.” Wow. Just wow.
I actually thought “THE Garry Kasparov” was even more ridiculous.
Tyler meant the chess guy, you see. Not the taco truck driver, not the guy who was key grip on Fast Times at Ridgemont High, not the former Senator from Kansas, not the IT guy Hillary used for her illegal server, not the studio drummer that The Who used to use when Keith Moon was incapacitated.
THE Garry Kasparov. You know – the chess guy.
To be fair, the Gary Kasparovs I know all bow before THE Gary Kasparov’s chess achievements. Also, as far as I know, Senator Garry Kasparov has never shown up to work during the eighteen years he kept his seat. According to the Tea Party, he never was able to build a Conservative reputation at Congress although he has spent little public money, so I guess he was kinda fiscal conservative . But the Raj Chetties I know are not that impressed with Cowen’s Raj Chetty.
Indeed, he really is the Gary Kasparov.
Like the Bobby Fischer.
The The The:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nonGWDxcJNA
Hahaha.
There is a tendency among Tamils (particularly non-Brahmins) to overplay the tamil identity and downplay the Indian identity. I see that with Chetty here too.
While I don’t deny diversity in India, Tamil civilization is not something distinct from Indian civilization. It is a branch of the Indian banyan tree.
The “South Indian philosophical HInduism” that Cowen mentions is not something of “South Indian” origin – most of the texts in this tradition are commentaries on Sanskrit texts composed in Pre-Christian era North India. The influence of Sanskrit on Southern culture and languages is immense. And it is fair to say that Southern culture in some respects is more “Aryan” in its present form than the Islamized culture of many northern states.
There is a tendency among Tamils (particularly non-Brahmins) to overplay the tamil identity and downplay the Indian identity.
Perhaps this is more true of long-term expats and emigrants than Tamils living in India? You are right about Indian and Tamil civilizations, but India the country does not exactly measure up to the Westphalian nation-state ideal (one dominant language, one universal or at least dominant religion.) It may be that to people who have lived in a different country for years, the Indian identity ceases to make sense (especially if they are assimilated into their host cultures) and when asked where they come from, they default to the largest “homogeneous” political unit they can think of.
For my part, my Tamil identity was always subordinated to my Indian one, especially since I was born and raised in the North, and pretty much all the Tamils I know feel the same way.
Yes, same here. But I feel this varies a lot across castes. Among tamil brahmins I see that the tamil identity is clearly subordinate to the Indian identity, though there are exceptions.
Among other castes I see that the tamil identity is very strong and somehow there is a disinclination to honor or acknowledge the northern inheritance (be it the enormous influence of Sanskrit or Sanskrit texts on just about every aspect of Tamil Hinduism)
“India the country does not exactly measure up to the Westphalian nation-state ideal (one dominant language, one universal or at least dominant religion”
There clearly is one dominant religion. And in terms of language, the influence of Sanskrit on all Indian languages (including Dravidian) is more massive than say the influence of Latin on European languages.
People may retort – well even Europe shares a dominant religion. But Christianity hardly impacts day to day lifestyle in Europe (even in the past). In contrast Hinduism is a way of life that influences every aspect of secular existence.
There clearly is one dominant religion.
What I meant was that the Constitution of India is not formed (or shaped) by the Hindu/Vedic religion, nor is the Hindu religion given primacy or preference by law. In most European countries, one religion was indeed made dominant over all others and given privileges and exemptions (some form of Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodox, or even Islam if you include Turkey.)
And I agree with you about the influence of Sanskrit. I am not very highly literate in Tamil (a consequence of not growing up in Tamil country), but the colloquial (actually, early 20th century) Tamil I speak has a more than generous sprinkling of Sanskrit-derived words. Though I’ve also read that Brahmins speak a more Sanskritized dialect than other Tamils. Is that true in your experience?
“the influence of Sanskrit on all Indian languages (including Dravidian) is more massive than say the influence of Latin on European languages” This seems hilariously wrong in the case of Dravidian languages. Are you seriously asserting that Sanskrit has more “influence” on Tamil or Malayalam than Latin on Italian or Spanish?
Romance languages are of course descendants of Latin, so shrikanthk’s comparison doesn’t hold universally. But how much of an impact has Latin had on non-Romance languages? (This is not a rhetorical question; I genuinely want to know the answer.) Certainly there is a lot of impact on modern English, which is a hybrid of an old Germanic dialect and a Romance language (French). But others? Scandinavian languages, Slavic languages?
I speak Tamil, and know for a fact that Tamil has a lot of Sanskrit vocabulary (with older pronunciations that were lost even in the north Indian tongues). And Tamil is considered to be the least Sanskritized of the Dravidian languages. Kannada, for example, has more Sanskrit vocabulary than Tamil.
Sanskrit words are much more common in South Indian languages than North. You are confusing historical genealogy of word roots, with influence on language. Just read extracts from Malayalam or Telugu.
“Are you seriously asserting that Sanskrit has more “influence” on Tamil or Malayalam than Latin on Italian or Spanish?”
Not for the example you give. But yes, the influence of Latin on say Marathi or Gujarati or Bengali is far far greater than the influence of Latin on English or Dutch.
Sorry for the typo…I meant “the influence of Sanskrit on Marathi”
Why would you mention dutch and English together like that? Maybe dutch and German, but English had a massive number of loan words from medieval French and a well read English speaker can easily interpret significant portions of Spanish or French text
“Tamil civilization is not something distinct from Indian civilization. It is a branch of the Indian banyan tree.”
I can’t tell if you’re being dense on purpose, but Dravidian civilization is clearly distinct to a considerable degree from North Indian Vedic civilization (even if there is now considerable admixture). And the North Indian Vedic “banyan tree” is itself part of the Indo-Iranian Deodar tree (see Avestan and Vedic Sanskrit), which are themselves derived from the Kurgan culture of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, dating back to the Copper Age. What’s your point?
You are conflating two different issues. Sanskrit words are much more common in South Indian languages than North. You are confusing historical genealogy of word roots, with influence on language. Just read extracts from Malayalam or Telugu.
“Sanskrit words are much more common in South Indian languages than North.”
Unless you can provide a citation, I’m holding to my opinion that this is very wrong.
The north indian languages may have descended from Sanskrit, but their vocabulary is greatly persianized. South indian languages may not have descended from Sanskrit, but their vocabulary is greatly Sanskritized.
So there are many many Sanskrit words used in say Kannada, that you will seldom hear in Delhi! Eg : Prayojana, Yajamana, Akasmath etc.
What he is saying that there is little similarity between the lived experiences and memories of southern Indians and the academically-derived classification of the people of the subcontinent (into Indo-Europeans, Dravidians, and others.) Southern Indians (Dravidian speakers) have very much considered themselves to be part of Indic civilization since antiquity. The Dravidian separatist movements of the 20th century were not inspired by folk memory (there was, and is, nothing in folk memory to indicate any divisions among Indians, or any antagonism between northerners and southerners), but by the theories put forth by linguists, archaeologists, and historians (which may end up being true, but so what?)
For other examples, Basques, Hungarians, and Finns are very much part of the same civilizations their neighbors share. Language differences of course are stark, but civilization (or culture) is not synonymous with language.
“there was, and is, nothing in folk memory to indicate any divisions among Indians, or any antagonism between northerners and southerners”
Prior to the British occupation (and unification) I highly doubt Kashmiris considered themselves part of the same civilization as the people living in Mizoram or that Haryana peasants would have thought they had anything in common with the hill tribes of Odisha ( in terms of gods, food, marriage and kinship practices, modes of production and other things that make up “civilization”).
Kris makes an excellent point.
Academic theories are one thing. The historical memory of a culture is another thing.
Academic theory says Kannada is from a different language family than say Marathi. Theory will also tell you that Kannada is more distant from Marathi than Marathi is from Dutch (as both are IE). But how will a common man receive that academic tidbit?
He will laugh his head off. Would a kannadiga rather listen to Marathi or Dutch? Marathi ofcourse! A kannadiga is likelier to follow Marathi (with its heavy Sanskrit dosage) than say Tamil which has fewer Sanskrit nouns.
“Prior to the British occupation (and unification) I highly doubt Kashmiris considered themselves part of the same civilization as the people living in Mizoram or that Haryana peasants would have thought they had anything in common with the hill tribes of Odisha”
There clearly was a brahmanic unity of the elites. Sure, that strikes you as elitist. But that’s a fact of life. Cosmopolitan identity construction that transcends small areas was a preoccupation of elites for much of human history.
Kashmiri Shaivism of 9th-10th century is not fundamentally antagonistic to Advaitin Monism (which got popularized in Kerala/Tamil nadu in 8th century)
“Academic theory says Kannada is from a different language family than say Marathi.”
To be clear, linguists look at grammatical structure when assigning language families. English grammar does have commonalities with other Germanic languages but, since England was invaded by the French and subscribed to Catholicism for a long stretch of time, the influence of French and Latin vocabulary is obvious. In extreme cases, you have creole languages in which the vocabulary comes mostly from one foreign (usually colonial) source while the grammar is more closely related to indigenous languages.
Naturally, bad things usually happen when linguistic theory is co-opted by racial ideologues or nationalists.
How cute. Is TC angling for a daytime TV show? Like Ellen, but for PBS.
If he did, would you show up there to heckle him like you do here?
Will you show up to heckle the hecklers? “Leave my boyfriend alone” we get it say something new.
LOL at you thinking “yer ghey!” is witty.
It would have been interesting to hear about this views of India’s role in Sri Lanka,, given that he is Tamil.
Tyler brings up some of my criticisms of Chetty’s methodology in his big, very interesting upward mobility study:
“COWEN: Let’s go now to some of your research on mobility, which is maybe, at this moment, what you’re best known for. You can identify counties or parts of the United States where mobility for generations is going to be especially high. To what extent do you think that’s picking up that simply some of those regions end up with resource booms or other good events that is, in a sense, just random? It doesn’t per se have to do with the region? Or do you think we can adjust for that?”
Here’s my appreciative critique of Chetty’s 2015 work on all the counties in America in terms of where to raise your children:
http://takimag.com/article/moneyball_for_real_estate_steve_sailer/print#axzz4hyy9mG4e
I pointed out that Chetty’s honor roll of counties where kids raised by blue collar parents in the 1990s were making more money in 2011-2012 than their parents were in 1996-2000 is dominated by North Central rural counties enjoying prosperity due to energy and Chinese demand. Chetty responds to TC:
“First, even if you hold fixed the rate of growth, the rate of economic growth, you find that some places have much higher rates of upward mobility than others.
“To give you an example, Atlanta is a city that’s booming in terms of jobs and economic growth overall. But Atlanta’s one of the places with the lowest levels of upward mobility for kids growing up in low-income families there.
“The second thing you see is these rates of upward mobility, to the extent we have data, they tend to be quite persistent overtime. It’s not like the places that have high upward mobility in one decade, suddenly a very low upward mobility in the next decade. It’s a pretty persistent phenomenon.”
Sorry, but the obvious reason Atlanta looks much worse in Chetty’s methodology than, say, Rep. Steve King’s Sioux County, Iowa (the best county in America according to Chetty) or Salt Lake City (the best metro area according to Chetty) is because Fulton County is heavily black and blacks regress toward a lower mean income than do whites.
“because Fulton County is heavily black and blacks regress toward a lower mean income than do whites.”
Another one of those times when you show your true self. For you the history and complexity of a place reduce to one thing: blackness.
Two things, actually: blackness and whiteness.
I’m sorry, but it’s this kind of lowbrow anti-empirical hate that makes Chetty feel as if, for the sake of his career, he’d better not think too hard nor, especially, tell anybody about what his research really says.
Look, the Atlanta metro area is often thought the best place in America for educated blacks. Over the last quarter of a century or so, it has had a large influx of college graduate blacks, who clearly feel it has a lot to offer people like themselves. If I were a college educated black and I wanted my children to be raised around the children of other college educated blacks, I would definitely consider moving to the Atlanta area.
But, even in the Atlanta metro, Regression Toward Mean still applies. Blacks have a lower mean income than whites in this country, and Atlanta therefore looks bad in Chetty’s methodology of comparing parents’ income in the 1990s to their kids’ income in the early 2010s.
Would children of college educated blacks moving down increase mobility?
The problem as always is even if one accepts the data, our priors determine the reasons for it. Racists will say “blacks do worse because they are dumb and their culture sucks”. Non-racists will say “blacks do worse because their history and current condition involve terribly unfair events and prejudices, so that’s what makes their average intelligence lower and their culture less suited for success”.
It would be perfectly reasonable for Chetty to maintain a stance of agnosticism toward the ultimate causes of the national race gaps in mean income. He could admit that “Until whatever it is that causes the races in America to have different average incomes stops happening, it’s almost statistically inevitable that my methodology will show lower income mobility in heavily non-Asian minority counties than in counties that are heavily white and/or Asian.”
But he doesn’t want to admit that, perhaps because there isn’t much interest in America in how we can influence, say, whites to be more like the whites in Sioux County, Iowa and less like the whites in McDowell County, West Virginia.*
All the excitement and money and prestige is in Closing the Race Gap. Chetty encourages people to assume that his study will find out how to close The Gap between blacks and whites, even though his study is almost hopeless at finding that (because even though he has your IRS returns and mine, he doesn’t have the race of taxpayers due to the IRS not collecting it and the IRS anonymizing the data before giving it to Chetty).
* McDowell County, WV has been notorious since JFK’s famous visit for having the poorest, most backward, most self-destructive white hillbillies in America. And yet, even McDowell Co. does fairly well in Chetty’s measures of upward mobility: such is the power of Regression Toward the Mean.
msgkings, wise men spotted these “two options” long ago. Even when black men were still in chains, the wise (black and white) recognized that offering dignity increased their own.
As true now and then, refusing dignity to others only reduces your own. Particularly when you refuse dignity on the self-reinforcing principle that “it can never be better than this.”
msgkings May 24, 2017 at 4:41 pm
Racists will say “blacks do worse because they are dumb and their culture sucks”. Non-racists will say “blacks do worse because their history and current condition involve terribly unfair events and prejudices, so that’s what makes their average intelligence lower and their culture less suited for success”.
I am sorry but you believe racists and non-racists agree that Blacks are below average intelligence and their culture sucks?
“And yet, even McDowell Co. does fairly well in Chetty’s measures of upward mobility: such is the power of Regression Toward the Mean.”
Charles Murray admitted in one interview that one reason why he thinks white America is “coming apart” is that low IQ whites marry other low IQ whites and propagate low IQ genes and same for high IQ whites to the point where their respective outcomes are diverging. Is he right or not? You assert here that people regress toward a “racial mean” which would rule out the notion that whites would separate by IQ into different subgroups in the long-run. If we take the concept of regression toward the racial mean seriously, we shouldn’t be worried about the phenomenon of high IQ elite whites only marrying each since most of their great-grandkids or great-great-grandkids will experience a downward mobility that matches the upward mobility of white people born in McDowell County.
That is, unless environmental factors that can persist across generations are important for IQ and/or the concept of a white race with a single “racial mean” that can be attributed to genetics is meaningless.
I’m sorry, but it’s this kind of lowbrow anti-empirical hate
Lowbrow you say, Steve? You should read the comments on your blog post about this. 90% of the comments are attacks on “Chetty the Indian”, how craven he is, and how he will never understand the “historic American nation” (because, well, I don’t know, maybe he doesn’t have the right genes or something.)
An interesting thing about what you say is, that a story can be told that due to racism and or discrimination it is much harder for blacks to rise in income decile and so let’s only look at whites or blacks, but he does not tell that story, nor does he bother to explain why that factor can be ignored, even though it is the most obvious difference between Atlanta and Iowa and Utah, he just pushes on ignoring it. Strange.
As I wrote in 2015:
In total, six of Chetty’s Bottom 25 worst counties are majority aboriginal (five Indian reservations plus Nome, Alaska).
Another nine of Chetty’s Bottom 25 are majority black (and the remaining ten are all above the national mean in percentage black).
The sheer blackness of Chetty’s Worst Places Lists is so obvious that Chetty has to admit it:
“One of the salient findings in Chetty et al. (2014) is that areas with a higher fraction of African Americans have much lower observed rates of upward mobility.”
But this result has been a recurrent embarrassment to him. He really doesn’t want to bring up the Occam’s Razor explanation: that while every family regresses over the generations toward the mean, blacks regress toward a lower mean income than do whites.
http://takimag.com/article/moneyball_for_real_estate_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4i2fRioL2
Facts are facts, sure. But why is this so?
“while every family regresses over the generations toward the mean, blacks regress toward a lower mean income than do whites.”
This was loathsome 5 years ago, when it was just sheltered suburban white men practicing a powerless bigotry on the back roads of the Internet.
It is quite unconscionable now when we know that the Dylann Roofs, the James Harris Jacksons, the Sean Urbanskis, are out there listening.
You should have known 5 years ago that “blacks” were not living in some bias-free genetic experiment. Even then you should have known the risks of reinforcing bigotry. You should sure as heck know now. If you can’t find a more productive use of your time, at least stand down.
I can’t tell whether Anonymous is a Tiny Duck-style satirist or if he really is naively spouting the Conventional Wisdom …
But, yeah, we seem to be moving toward a culture where knowing about the existence of regression toward the mean is considered racist. After all, regression was discovered by Galton and we all know Galton was St. Darwin’s Evil Twin.
It would be perfectly reasonable for Chetty to adjust for regression toward the racial mean in some fashion so he could look for more subtle drivers of income mobility.
Perhaps Chetty would simply have to end up doing what Charles Murray did in Coming Apart and in much of The Bell Curve: just compare highly white counties to other highly white counties. There might still be something interesting to find, although I suspect his white vs. white results would tend to echo David Hackett Fischer’s “Albion’s Seed.”
Right Steve. Someone invented math, and once invented (like Zyklon B) it just had to be used.
“we all know Galton was St. Darwin’s Evil Twin.”
I thought they were cousins.
Anonymous you are everything that is wrong with the American left right now. You have no capacity to discuss race other than to hysterically shout “racism”. Sailer all but said that the observed differences could be due to systematic racism and yet your only response seems to be gasp even louder that someone mentioned race in a way that isnt totally consistent with the preferred far left dialog.
What are you going to do when the rest of the world no longer cares who you think is racist? When your one trick is so played out that screaming racism at the top of your lungs no longer even moves the needle?
“all but” is a very funny phrasing, but you are right. Steve did everything but suggest that we are not altogether done in our transition from a slave holding to an equal opportunity society.
He certainly did everything but suggest that regression to the mean could be mutable, just as literacy, educational attainment, median wage, and life expectancy proved mutable for the former slave.
“all but”
Instead the repeated claim that regression is immutable, destiny. I am sure we can imagine similar claims made in 1840, that the attainment of blacks then was destiny, immutable. Of course we don’t need to imagine. They were neatly written up a few years later, in the articles of secession.
Look, regression toward different racial means has been a huge problem for Chetty’s project since he debuted it in 2013 with a big splash in the New York Times. What Chetty is looking for is to find the secret sauce that makes it economically better when you are an adult to have grown up in one place rather than another.
But to find out this subtle stuff, he still needs to deal better with all the more obvious stuff, like race, locals booms and busts, and cost of living differences.
As I pointed out in the Times’ comments in 2013, Chetty’s map of low upward income mobility “commuting zones”
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/neighborhoods/
looks pretty much like a map of the black and American Indian parts of the country.
And that’s pretty much inevitable since he’s comparing a first generation’s income in 1996-2000 to their children’s income in 2011-12, and the race gap didn’t much change over that period. So regression toward the mean meant it was statistically inevitable that on average more black areas like Atlanta and Charlotte would have lower upward income mobility than less black areas like Salt Lake City and Seattle.
That was embarrassing to Chetty, and he’s since take a number of steps since to mitigate some of the problems with his analysis. I praise him for all the hard work he has put into this project over the years. But he still has a ways to go before he’s going to find the secret sauce that he’s promised this project would uncover.
Moreover, he is using unprecedented IRS taxpayer data, so I think he owes it to Americans to listen to his critics and not try to handwave away major problems with his analysis as he tried to do with Tyler.
““all but” is a very funny phrasing, but you are right. Steve did everything but suggest that we are not altogether done in our transition from a slave holding to an equal opportunity society.”
Yes, quelle horreur, he did not unreservedly recite the accepted dialog wholesale.
Math = zyklon B. I think this was meant in jest, but if you consider how many people would be happy to see math go back in the bottle, it isn’t really that far-fetched, to think of a future where math is no longer part of the ordinary curriculum. Its fortunes have waxed and waned before.
Perhaps not math in general, but statistics are in trouble as the zeitgeist gets ever more intolerant of empiricism. For example, I could see a Bayesianism=Bigotry prejudice arising.
There is all the rest of creation to be empirical about. Perhaps we should take all this drama and superstition as a sign that we don’t belong at the center of the universe.
It is interesting that he chose to become a social scientist instead of a physician given that his physician mom probably worked for more than his professor dad. I suspect that he knew early on that he either became and influential (and probably well paid) social scientist or an average but well-paid physician.
Your remark comes off as a little snide.
In a typical middle class Indian family there would be pressure to move to a career as an Engineer or Physician. In the environment in which he grew up , he was probably encouraged to view academia as a choice. perhaps his mother was impressed not only by the quality of US Education , but by the flexibility here. It is much harder in India for the brilliant to move away from the more obvious career choices.
Excellent interview. Thank you.
I wish Professor Cowen had asked about his views on upward mobility and the religion of immigrants in the US. Digging deeper than many Hindus or some Muslim immigrants are highly educated. How does this play into geography? Will future generations of Hindus who grew up in Silicon Valley do different from those who grew up in Atlanta? Which recent immigrant religious group is likely to see the largest intergenerational change in mobility? How does family structure interact with exposure? Can he compare the effects of say West Indian Hinduism or Islam to Indian or Pakistani Hindusim and Islam? There is a lot more that can be unpacked …
In my 2015 “Moneyball for Real Estate” article about Chetty’s county-level research, I wrote:
“Fertility is actually a promising avenue for Chetty to pursue in the future. As we’ll see below, his income calculations are stricken with problems, but he appears to have the data to estimate the answers to questions such as: where should you move if you want your child to present you with a legitimate grandchild by the time you are, say, 70? That is the kind of thing you aren’t supposed to discuss in public these days, but I’d be surprised if Mr. and Mrs. Chetty don’t worry about it.”
http://takimag.com/article/moneyball_for_real_estate_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4i2HNOjqf
Turns out I was right:
CHETTY: There are also other phenomena that are more subtle, related to things like marriage patterns. Relating this back to personal experience, I remember when working on these issues and thinking about our decision to move from Harvard to Stanford. At the time, we actually were expecting our first child, a daughter. And I noticed in our data that, for kids in affluent families in the Bay Area, daughters tend to have very low household earnings. And I found that kind of curious and we spent some time trying to dig into why what was, partly given my personal interest in the issue.
COWEN: So, your own moving decision was influenced by this research.
CHETTY: [laughs] In some ways.
COWEN: Yeah.
CHETTY: What you find is an interesting explanation, which is, if you look at individual earnings rather than household income, girls growing up here in the Bay Area do extremely well. However, when you look at household income, they don’t do so well, and that’s because they’re much, much less likely to be married than if they grew up somewhere else.
COWEN: Yes.
CHETTY: So if you’re in your mid-30s, only something like a quarter or less of girls growing up in the Bay Area are married, and we show in our paper that every extra year you spend growing up in the Bay Area, you’re less likely to get married. I remember telling my wife, “I don’t think we need to worry. Our daughter will be fine in terms of earnings. It’s just that she might not be married if we move to California.”
COWEN: So, you’ve lowered your expectations for grandchildren?
CHETTY: Yes. [laughs]
“CHETTY: One of the strong correlates we find is that places that are more integrated across socioeconomic groups, that have lower segregation, tend to have better outcomes for kids. And that kind of thing in a rural area — you can see why that occurs and why it might lead to better outcomes.
If you live in a big city, it’s very easy to self-segregate in various ways. You live in a gated community, you send your kids to a private school. You essentially don’t interact with people from different socioeconomic classes. If you live in a small town in Iowa, pretty much there’s one place your kids are going to go to school. There’s one set of activities that you can all participate in. And that is likely to lead to more integration.”
Chetty is just using “segregation” as a euphemism for “Non-Asian minority.” The places with the highest upward mobility in his findings aren’t “integrated,” they are highly white and/or Asian. (The places with the most downward mobility are Indian reservations, such as Pine Ridge.)
I’ve noticed the spread of this euphemism a lot over the last 2 or 3 years: e.g., I’m always reading that the homicide rate in Chicago is highest in the “most segregated neighborhoods.”
In Chetty’s case, however, he shouldn’t use this euphemism because it’s really confusing him. It’s blinding him and the journalists who listen to him that a big force driving his results is plain old Regression Toward the Mean.
Maryland sociologist Philip N. Cohen pointed out how Chetty’s 2014 paper tries to euphemize the role of blackness behind related factors like de facto “segregation:”
“Instead, they drop percent Black for racial segregation. I have no idea why, especially considering … in these normalized correlations, fraction Black has a stronger relationship to mobility than racial segregation or economic segregation! In fact, it’s just about the strongest relationship on the whole long table (except for single mothers, with which it is of course highly correlated).”
https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/where-is-race-in-the-chetty-et-al-mobility-paper/
I would bet a good amount of money that the experienced kindergarten teacher stuff is spurious. It is just too hard to imagine a mechanism where having a kindergarten teacher with greater than 10 years experience doesn’t help you do better in high school but makes yo do better earning money.
I see no plausible mechanism.
BTW If it was the case it would probably not call for higher pay but something like assisting an experienced teacher for a few years before getting your own class.
Here’s my conclusion to my long review of Chetty’s big 2015 project searching for the causes of variation in income mobility among counties:
In summary, Chetty’s data still suffers from crippling problems with:
– Regression toward the mean (especially among races)
– Temporary booms and busts
– Cost of living differences.
Yet, these should not be impossible challenges for him to overcome in future iterations.
http://takimag.com/article/moneyball_for_real_estate_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4i2OykHmB
For an example of Chetty’s income mobility studies having huge problems with temporary booms and busts:
What does Chetty know that all these families didn’t know?
Well, he knows what happened in 2008. Chetty’s hindsight is 20-20.
Let’s look at the whitest county among his Worst 25, Horry County, South Carolina, which is on the Atlantic just south of the North Carolina state line. We modern Americans can think more objectively about relatively white places like this Golf Capital of the World. Horry is home to the immense Myrtle Beach resort that features at least 91 golf courses on its Grand Strand. Despite Chetty’s assertion of its awfulness, Horry has grown 52 percent in population since 2000.
So, what was it about Myrtle Beach that made it bad for the next generation? Does golf undermine the moral fiber of youth?
Nah. The example of Myrtle Beach’s ups and downs just makes clear a recurrent problem with Chetty’s methodology: even though he’s claiming to find long-term verities about how best to organize communities, his findings are extremely susceptible to temporary local booms and busts. Chetty’s 1996-2000 baseline era represented a historic golf resort construction boom in Horry County, with unemployment dropping as low as 2.5 percent in 1998-99. In contrast, Chetty’s 2011-2012 measurement era was part of the collapse of golf course construction, with unemployment never dropping below 10 percent in Horry County from 2009-2013.
Not surprisingly, Myrtle Beach’s endless growth and low cost of living brought in large numbers of people in the 1990s for construction and tourism jobs. They did well in 1996-2000, but their kids wound up getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop in 2011-2012. But, lately, rich Chinese looking to buy American golf courses to launder their ill-gotten gains have discovered Myrtle Beach, so the future looks brighter than the recent past.
To sum up, blue collar Americans were doing well building golf condos in Myrtle Beach in the 1990s. But then golf went out of fashion, so the construction boom collapsed. But now Myrtle Beach is coming back because Chinese Communist Party white-collar criminals are really getting into golf.
In other words, one of Chetty’s big lessons is that if you are a blue collar worker, you should move to a county that will be booming a decade and a half from now for reasons you can’t possibly anticipate.
http://takimag.com/article/moneyball_for_real_estate_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4i2h2aBe9
“Yet generation after generation, Iowa seems to produce very good outcomes for low-income families. So that again suggests it’s not about natural resources or temporary booms. It’s something more persistent.”
Hmmm, what do you think is something that is persistently transferred to children and grand-children which affects life outcomes? Must be the magic dirt, ever persistently in the ground!
“So I think that’s really clear evidence that, conditional on genetics, environment really matters.”
But does he try to distinguish effects of genetics on his studies of upward mobility or inequality? I feel like the style of contemporary economics is to do really sophisticated data mining that manages to completely miss a really foundational variable. Imagine what we would know if we took the genetic effect on behavior seriously in sociology and economics.
“I don’t think we need to worry. Our daughter will be fine in terms of earnings. It’s just that she might not be married if we move to California..”
Why worry – as long as you have money, who needs children?
“Why worry – as long as you have money, who needs children?” – literally something Montgomery Burns would say. But I don’t think you are joking.
“Must be the magic dirt, ever persistently in the ground!”
Actually, Chetty’s Best County in America, Sioux County, Iowa really does have Magic Dirt … or at least it has just about the best soil in America for growing corn. One farm in Sioux County sold for $20,000 per acre of unimproved farmland in 2013.
I hadn’t heard of Sioux County before researching Chetty’s findings, but it really is famous among people who know about such things as just about the best farm county in the Midwest. That impressed me that Chetty really is on to something with his research.
Likewise, his worst county in the U.S. is the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota. I had heard about Pine Ridge before, and just about everything I had heard was tragic.
Overall, there’s a fair amount of evidence that Chetty’s study really is on to something, which is why I want him to clean up its three big remaining methodological problems of Regression Toward the Mean, Temporary Booms and Busts, and Cost of Living Differences.
If Chetty would take those problems seriously and fix them, he might actually get some results in what he’s been hoping to find out about government policies and social norms that make a difference, pro or con, for the next generation.
What makes America America is that social status is fleeting. I may hang on to the accomplishments of my ancestors, but I don’t have to carry their burden. I trace my ancestors to the revolutionary war if not to the mayflower, but does anyone really care. Most folks I know not only can’t trace their ancestors back one hundred years but prefer not to. I’ve always suspect that Americans take such great pride in their heritage because they don’t have one.
I can probally dunk but I don’t care to. Does anyone care?
The response to this statement would be no you probaly can’t and clearly you seem to care. Same response to your meandering post.
+1
>I’ve always suspected that Americans take such great pride in their heritage because they don’t have one.
Wow. Did you steal this sentence? It’s the best one I’ve ever read on MR.
I would only add that our lack of heritage makes some of us vulnerable to selfish and vicious politicians, who wish to divide us via identity politics, and set us against each other. So, roughly half of our politicians are actively encouraging us to take our false “heritage” very, very seriously. Sometimes via litigation.
We call these asshats “Democrats.”
America has a heritage: a very distinctive ethnic majority with its own history, heroes and myths dating back over four centuries. But since “all men are created equal” and the US is a “nation of immigrants” (and never, never ever, a nation of natives), it’s gauche if not illegal to acknowledge it. Also, it crowds out the heritages of the newer arrivals. So to maximize everybody’s comfort level, we just endow America with this kind of strip mall-heritage that started around 1965. Before then was the Dark Ages.
Why no assorted links?
The fact that Raj Chetty is less worried at the prospect of not having grand kids and more worried about his daughter’s income shows how deep the marxist materialist rot has set. And how far we have progressed on the road to perdition.
+1
In a conversation about upward mobility, it’s amazing that there was no discussion of the parental influence brought to bear to get Chetty fabulous internships in university labs when he was a high school student and a freshman in college. There were no others better qualified?
It sounds like the best way to get ahead is to have parents who use their influence to get gigs for their children.
Really disappointed that you didn’t challenge his claim about twin studies. That shared environment contributes almost nothing to outcomes is one of the most durable, well-replicated findings in twin studies. And when he talks about discipline, he’s really talking about Conscientiousness in the Five Factor Model – which itself has a strong genetic basis. Just another convoluted means to bash teachers.
I was disappointed that there wasn’t much follow-up on the idea that teachers should be rewarded based on value-addition, which has been disputed in the DC area by local teachers. First, how can a teacher get a high rating if the children come from a group that is expected to perform well — upper-middle class, educated and involved parents, and extra-curricular resources? Second, teachers have complained that their VA scores changed dramatically between years, with outstanding scores inexplicably followed the next year with low scores.