YouSaid · the spoken record

Raj Chetty

lines on the record: 75
first: 2017-05-24
most recent: 2017-05-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, so are you asking what accounts for the difference and why does Europe do it differently from the US or why do Europeans react differently than Americans do? Well, both.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“seems really critical of something that struck us as being an intuitive hypothesis, but then figuring out how to document that clearly in the data. And that has led the field to be able to now look at neighborhoods in a very different way than people were looking at in the past.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's just something, you know, I think coming from a science background from childhood, I've really appreciated the clarity, for instance, of scientific experiments where you can just say with precision that this is what we think happened when you changed something. And so having that interest from a young age, I want to be able to explain my findings to my parents or my wife, Fusa neuroscientist and so forth. And so that type of focus, I think is something that distinguishes our research group. And I think just trying to think in innovative ways about problems that people have worked on in the past. So for instance, there's been a lot of work on neighborhood effects for 30 years. Our group by no means is the first to think about neighborhood effects, where we've tried to push forward a little bit is thinking about the mechanisms through which neighborhoods affect kids and showing that in particular every year of exposure during childhood.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that is our strategy. I think the other thing that's extremely important is we spend a lot of time on trying to achieve clarity. So I think there are ways to write papers in economics that are more accessible to the public and more thereby have greater impact. And there are ways to write papers that are kind of more technically oriented and narrow the set of readers.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We take pride in the fact that subsequent studies do not end up showing oh, you know, there was some assumption made there that ends up being questionable or the data is not quite up to par, et cetera. We're very careful on all those steps.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now it turns out you don't have that data in the US going back to 1940, which is when we wanted to start our analysis. In fact, you only have that data starting really for kids born in the 1980s. The key conceptual idea of that paper was to figure out a way, even though you could not link parents and kids a statistical method of determining the fraction of kids doing better than their parents despite that data limitation. And so I think often our conceptual advances are in the context of taking a big question, using the best data that we can possibly get, but then closing that gap and trying to find creative methods and creative answers to those old questions and executing in the best way possible and making sure, I think one thing I take pride in is the conclusions we reach and the statements we make, we're quite confident in them. So we're”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obvious that that's the set of calculations you should have done. So let me give you an example, a concrete example in the context of the paper you just mentioned. The one that came out, I think, after that Twitter comment you mentioned where we look at the fading American dream and look at how children's chances of doing better than their parents have changed over time. Well, it turns out when you dig into the details of that analysis, In order to know if a child is doing better than their parents, you would think you need to have a data set where you see both the parents' income and the kid's income. Right.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what hopefully our contribution and scale is, is showing how you can take those large data sets and kind of not get lost in them and bring out the key lessons that are relevant for thinking about these classic questions. So I think it's very easy. Students often have this reaction that, you know, all I need to do is get access to this big data set, right? And then I'm going to be all set for my thesis. And what you end up finding is that that is often not the case. It's very easy to write a paper that is not that good even with cutting edge data and modern techniques. And so one of the things that I try to do, and I think the easiest way to see this is if you internally within our research group see the iterations of the papers we've been working on, where we start out is often very far away from the papers that people see as the finished product. And so we work hard to try to write a paper that ex post seems extremely simple.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a tough question. I think part of what we try to do is exactly, as you said, take old questions. I think some of the most important questions in economics and social science have not yet been fully answered. And the recent availability of big data of various types allows us, I think, for the first time to tackle those classic questions. What our research group tries to do, I think, is bring those two things together and use them.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marty was such an inspiring figure for me in terms of the impact he's had on the profession, the questions he was working on. I think what struck me immediately was that the types of questions Marty asked and work on some of the most fundamental questions in economic policy. And he didn't shy away from asking the big picture questions, even though it might be difficult to answer them perfectly. And so what I think had a big impact on me in working with Marty is him giving me quite a bit of independence, even at a very early age. So when I was a sophomore, technically working for him as a research assistant, he kind of said, you know, you seem to have a number of ideas. Let's talk about them rather than working on a specific project as an RA. Go work on the things you're interested in. Let's meet from time to time to talk about your ideas. And, you know, hearing that when you're 17 or 18 years old from somebody like Marty Feldstein is.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like my mom and my sisters, I was really interested in things like biomedical engineering. And so to get more experience with that, I worked in a lab for a couple of years at the medical college of Wisconsin when I was in high school. And the lab I happened to work in was an electron microscopy lab, and they were developing staining techniques to identify different types of cells and so on. That's the project I was involved in. I learned through that experience while science was fascinating and extremely important, I was more excited about the statistical aspects of that work rather than the staining itself or the pipetting or the microscopy. And I think that experience showed me that I was more interested in the number side thinking about social problems coming back to the earlier experiences we talked about. And that kind of led me down a different path.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I remember, I don't remember the details, but I remember questioning the evidence, you know, whether you could draw precise causal inferences, but whether you could say given that data, that the central thesis of time on the cross, did that really seem to be valid or not? Now, I can't quite remember the details of my argument or how rigorous it was. I'm sure I would poke holes in it myself given my current interest in data.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At age three or four. That's amazing. You know, just trying to make simple input output things and a small game and so forth.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether statistics or thinking about scientific questions or thinking about how to change things in the world, that's the environment which I grew up from the youngest of ages. My dad, I remember, brought home a computer from Belgium when I was three or four. And I remember starting to learn how to do some simple basic programming on it.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right? That's right. My dad did a lot of early work in Bayesian econometrics with Arnold Zellner. And I think 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 biocide”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it struck me even we lived on one side of the city and I'd take the bus through the entire city essentially to get to the school. And so you could feel the degree of segregation, which is one of the other things in our current work. We see Milwaukee, one of the most segregated cities, those types of places tend to have the lowest levels of upward mobility. So I happen to be lucky and be on the other end of the spectrum for kids in affluent families. Milwaukee has as good outcomes as any city in the US. And so my experience was very consistent with that. And I think once again, seeing those disparities made me wonder how much of where I will end up in life happens to be because of having the opportunity to go to this school as opposed to going to some other school within that city.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I went to an outstanding college prep school, private school in Milwaukee called the University School of Milwaukee. And at the time, I recognized the fact that the resources and opportunities we had at that school, which was on something like a 150-acre campus on the north side of Milwaukee, were extremely different from other schools that I visited, which I happen to visit in the context of the chess team and other tennis team that I was on. And so you'd see other schools and you'd see the vast differences in terms of how this private school looked relative to the public schools and what the neighborhoods look like and so forth.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The type of school where a lot of discipline, you really had to do all of your multiplication tables and memorization and so forth. And insofar as those kinds of non-cognitive skills, something we see in our research, discipline focused, things like that seem to be highly predictive of later outcomes. Perhaps that had a payoff.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I went to a Catholic school actually in India my first few years and was a very strict school and what I remember is you had to learn all your school was”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a bit of both. I thought, I don't think I fully understood the determinants of why people ended up in such different circumstances. I certainly felt didn't seem very fair to me. And so from a justice perspective and also from the perspective of trying to think about ultimately how might you change something like that, you know, at that age, I think I was too young to put those pieces together. But experiences like that, I think shaped the interest that I have today.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so seeing the Taj Mal is a striking experience in its own right because the monument is so majestic. But what struck me was the incredible contrast between the monument itself and what was outside, which was one of the most impoverished areas in India and Agra. And so just seeing the incredible contrast between the tourists and the people who were begging for food, basically, outside from the tourists left a mark on me, I think. And I think back to that experience is wondering why things were so different on the inside versus the outside.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. So, my grandfather, whom I'm named after, actually Nadarajan is my full name, was a freedom fighter alongside Mahatma Gandhi and had a lot of strong beliefs and principles that I share as well. For instance, the fact that my mom got an education was somewhat unusual at that time. She was one of the first women to become a doctor in our community. And so he believed very strongly in women's education and equal rights and so forth.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it so happened to be the case that my mom was the one chosen to get higher education in her family and my dad was chosen to get higher education in his family. And I see through the generations the impact that that has had, not just on their outcomes by mom's a physician, my dad's a statistician and economist, but on the subsequent generation with myself and my cousins, the opportunities I've had, I think were dramatically shaped by those decisions many generations ago.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, in many ways, I feel like my interest in the topic and a lot of what the data shows bears out my own personal experience. So actually going back even from my own experience in my family, going back to a previous generation to my parents, my parents both grew up in large families in Indian villages. And as you might know, what was common in developing countries at that time was to pick one child to educate because most families didn't have enough money to educate all of their kids”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, and thanks, Tyler, for having me. Pleasure to be here. So my last name, Chetty, actually, is the name of a business cast in India, the Chetiyars. And my family is originally from Tamil Nadu, and I grew up, I was born in New Delhi, India, so my parents had actually come to the US and then gone back to India and were in New Delhi when I was born.”
2017-05-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source