Harvard professor says data has answers for slipping standard of living
America is supposed to be the land of opportunity, but that reputation has frayed in recent decades. Raj Chetty is looking for common-sense ways to restore that fundamental hope. Speaking at a John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum on Wednesday evening, Chetty, Harvard’s William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics, lasered in on the decline of the oft-cited national promise, and showed a way forward through mining big data. The American dream has always been about improvement. The idea that “through hard work, any child could move up and earn more than their parent” is at its core, said Chetty, who also serves as director of Opportunity Insights, a team of researchers and policy analysts focused on this problem. However, in recent decades that dream has faded. Comparing base family income levels with those that followed 30 years later, he showed that Americans born in the 1940s and ’50s were “virtually guaranteed” to do...