Speaker 1: I'm Carol Masser and I'm Jason Kelly. Let's get into
Speaker 1: this week's feature story in the magazine, Harvard economist Raj Chetty.
Speaker 1: He's built a real time data tracker that gives a
Speaker 1: god's eye view of the pandemics lopsided impact. The mapping
Speaker 1: tool on his tracker allows you to visualize the divergence
Speaker 1: as it's played out, even in prosperous Manhattan and San
Speaker 1: Francisco neighborhoods. And Chetty's base of operations, it is Opportunity Insights.
Speaker 1: That's a venture based at Harvard that is part think tank,
Speaker 1: part research lab, and there his team of about forty
Speaker 1: researchers and policy specialists are using private data to study economics. Well,
Speaker 1: not a new idea, we know that, but the COVID
Speaker 1: crisis gave Jetty the confidence that he might be able
Speaker 1: to pull off something unprecedented. Chetty has become alarmed, Carol
Speaker 1: by what his troph of data is telling him. The
Speaker 1: recovery has stalled and the inequality is soaring. Those left
Speaker 1: behind by the economic changes of the past few decades
Speaker 1: could be robbed of any remaining opportunities to get ahead.
Speaker 1: And Jason Chetti's goal in diagnosing the source of the
Speaker 1: economic pain is to help find ways to cure it.
Speaker 1: But he also isn't pretending to have any simple solutions
Speaker 1: to the COVID recession or to America's worsening inequality gap.
Speaker 1: His ultimate message get the virus under control at all costs.
Speaker 1: This podcast is brought to you by t D A
Speaker 1: Merry Trade meet their newest trading platform, Think or swim web.
Speaker 1: It has all the essential tools and strategies in a
Speaker 1: streamlined interface, no download necessary. Visit t d A Merry
Speaker 1: Trade dot Com, slash Think or swim web to get started.
Speaker 1: His numbers don't lie. Harvard economist raj Chetty has a
Speaker 1: god's eye view of the pandemics damage. By Ben Steverman,
Speaker 1: raj Chetty hasn't eaten at a restaurant in months. In fact,
Speaker 1: he's barely left his home near Harvard, where he is
Speaker 1: an economics professor. The MacArthur Genius Grant recipient has been
Speaker 1: getting his haircuts from a stem cell biologist his wife.
Speaker 1: If you want to understand what really wrong with the economy,
Speaker 1: this is a telling symptom. Chetti used to travel widely
Speaker 1: sharing insights from his work which minds data to paint
Speaker 1: a vividly detailed picture of inequality in the US. Now, he,
Speaker 1: like millions of other affluent Americans, is at home. That
Speaker 1: might seem harmless. Chetti and his wife enjoy cooking together
Speaker 1: and spending time with their five year old daughter until
Speaker 1: you confront the effects on the already precarious livelihoods of
Speaker 1: the people who fed, clothed, and pampered this professional class.
Speaker 1: When COVID nineteen, hit Chetty and his team of about
Speaker 1: forty researchers and policy specialists dropped everything, including work on
Speaker 1: inequality in housing, higher education, and longevity to document the
Speaker 1: pandemics lopsided impact. The result is a data tracker that
Speaker 1: gives a day by day, state by state, and even
Speaker 1: neighborhood by neighborhood view of the coronavirus economy. First uploaded
Speaker 1: in May and frequently expanded sense it relies on non
Speaker 1: public proprietary data supplied by some of America's largest corporations
Speaker 1: to give a level of detail in real time that
Speaker 1: traditional economic indicators can't match. Last month, a couple of
Speaker 1: days after former Vice President Joe Biden selected California Senator
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris as his running mate. Chetty briefed the pair
Speaker 1: over video, presenting data that demonstrated lower income workers were
Speaker 1: bearing the brunt of the COVID recession. His chart showed
Speaker 1: that by April, the bottom quarter of wage earners, those
Speaker 1: making less than twenty seven thousand dollars a year, had
Speaker 1: lost almost eleven million jobs, more than three times the
Speaker 1: number lost by the top quarter, which earned more than
Speaker 1: sixty thou dollars annually. By late June, the gap had
Speaker 1: widened further, even though many businesses had reopened. In fact,
Speaker 1: the segment of Americans who were paid best had recovered
Speaker 1: almost all the jobs lost since the start of the pandemic.
Speaker 1: The recession has essentially ended for high income into visuals,
Speaker 1: Chetti told Biden and Harris. Meanwhile, the bottom half of
Speaker 1: American workers represented almost eight of the jobs still missing.
Speaker 1: Even as the better off watched employment rebound and the
Speaker 1: stock market surge. The virus is economic devastation was all
Speaker 1: around them. In shuttered restaurants, hair salons, and gems. It
Speaker 1: was no longer possible to ignore the economic chasms that
Speaker 1: separated people who used to live and work alongside one another.
Speaker 1: That creates this very local feel to the recession. Chetty
Speaker 1: says the mapping tool on his tracker allows you to
Speaker 1: visualize the divergence as it's played out in prosperous places
Speaker 1: from Manhattan's Upper East Side to San Francisco's Pacific Heights.
Speaker 1: The shock is most severe actually in the richest parts
Speaker 1: of the country and the richest neighborhoods in the country,
Speaker 1: he says. It's literally the people you were interacting with
Speaker 1: who I think are suffering the most. Chetty has been
Speaker 1: described as arguably the best applied microeconomist of his generation
Speaker 1: the American Economic Association which awarded him the Clark Medal,
Speaker 1: often described as the second most prestigious prize in the
Speaker 1: profession after the Nobel In. Like many of his contemporaries,
Speaker 1: Chetty largely issues theory and ideology in favor of data.
Speaker 1: The more the better. His goal in diagnosing the source
Speaker 1: of the economic pain is to help find ways to
Speaker 1: cure it. It's really done from the perspective of science,
Speaker 1: says Heather Boushey, a Biden adviser who heads the Washington
Speaker 1: Center for Equitable Growth. Chetty and his team have been
Speaker 1: talking about their newest project to any politician who will
Speaker 1: listen on video calls with dozens of Democrats and Republicans
Speaker 1: in Congress, as well as Treasury officials and state and
Speaker 1: local policymakers. His message has been consistent, get the virus
Speaker 1: under control at all costs, a task the US has
Speaker 1: so far failed at pitifully. No matter how many businesses
Speaker 1: are allowed to reopen, normal economic life will not resume
Speaker 1: until their customers feel the no longer at risk of contagion.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, he tells them, target assistance to the people, businesses,
Speaker 1: and places that need it. There's no use sending stimulus
Speaker 1: checks to households making a hundred and fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 1: a year or cutting their payroll taxes. They have plenty
Speaker 1: of money. What they lack is places to safely spend it.
Speaker 1: In the weeks before the US government's first jolt of
Speaker 1: stimulus ran out, Chetty was optimistic that both parties in
Speaker 1: Washington seemed to be getting the message. I've consistently found
Speaker 1: an appreciation for what the data have to say, even
Speaker 1: in these polarized times, he said. Then. But with infection
Speaker 1: rates spiking in a dozen states and Congress and the
Speaker 1: White House at an impasse over what should take the
Speaker 1: place of the now lapsed six d dollar a week
Speaker 1: pandemic unemployment benefit and other assistance furnished through the Cares Act.
Speaker 1: Chetty has become alarmed by what his trove of data
Speaker 1: is telling him. The recovery has stalled. Until recently, the
Speaker 1: COVID crisis of looked nothing like the Great recept of
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight or any other slump. With American
Speaker 1: businesses and workers held aloft by trillions of dollars in stimulus,
Speaker 1: the worst damage had been limited to certain sectors and
Speaker 1: had even started to heal. Now the economy's woes could metastasize,
Speaker 1: taking down industries and workers that were untouched before. All
Speaker 1: this threatens to make Chetti's work much more difficult. The
Speaker 1: American dream is dead, as he'd proved with exhaustive government
Speaker 1: data showing today's workers can no longer expect to earn
Speaker 1: more than their parents did. Now, those left behind by
Speaker 1: the economic changes of the past few decades could be
Speaker 1: robbed of any remaining opportunities to get ahead. One of
Speaker 1: Chetty's most stunning findings was rendered in twenty eighteen by
Speaker 1: the New York Times website in blue and yellow pixels
Speaker 1: that swarmed across the screen. It's beautiful, almost soothing, if
Speaker 1: you can forget you're watching a tragedy unfold. Each tiny
Speaker 1: square represents the life trajector of one of ten thousand
Speaker 1: American men born into a family at the top of
Speaker 1: the income spectrum. They fall or rise based on the
Speaker 1: extent to which they were able to match their parents
Speaker 1: comfortable incomes in adulthood. Those yellow pixels that keep bouncing
Speaker 1: up at the top of the screen are white men
Speaker 1: in the sample. The blue ones that keep tumbling to
Speaker 1: the bottom, they're black men. The animation is a simple,
Speaker 1: elegant illustration of the pernicious effects of racism on even
Speaker 1: the most privileged Black Americans. Many of Chetty's slides and
Speaker 1: charts tell similarly grim stories, even if the mild mattered
Speaker 1: forty one year old himself rarely shows much emotion. He
Speaker 1: presents the data in the most detached and remote way,
Speaker 1: says Ford Foundation President Darren Walker. Yet he visualizes suffering
Speaker 1: in this country in really profound ways. As a black man,
Speaker 1: when I see that data, I am emotionally disturbed and
Speaker 1: profoundly impacted. Chetty space of operations is Opportunity Insights, a
Speaker 1: venture based at Harvard that is part think tank, part
Speaker 1: research lab. Started in twenty eighteen with thirty six million dollars,
Speaker 1: including fifteen million dollars each from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. O I was
Speaker 1: co founded by Chetty, Harvard colleague Nathaniel Hendron, and Brown
Speaker 1: University professor John Friedman. Its mission, as spelled out on
Speaker 1: its website, is to identify barriers to economic opportunity and
Speaker 1: develop scalable solutions that will empower people throughout the United
Speaker 1: States to rise out of poverty and achieve better life outcomes,
Speaker 1: translation to improve economic mobility in the US. The center's
Speaker 1: staff includes more than a dozen recent college graduates trained
Speaker 1: in the art of sifting through data, with some sets
Speaker 1: so large they can take a computer a day or
Speaker 1: more to analyze. Chetty and his colleagues don't just identify problems,
Speaker 1: they suggest ways to fix them. A twenty fourteen study
Speaker 1: found that the best teachers can help each student to
Speaker 1: earn an additional fifty thousand dollars over their careers, which
Speaker 1: works out to one point four million dollars per home room.
Speaker 1: Chetty has suggested school districts hold on to skilled teachers
Speaker 1: by tying pay or bonuses to performance, Improving education for
Speaker 1: poor kids wouldn't just help them personally, Chetti's research suggests
Speaker 1: it should also boost the economy overall. An analysis of
Speaker 1: the patents filed by one point to million Americans found
Speaker 1: children of the top one percent are ten times more
Speaker 1: likely to be inventors than equally smart kids from other backgrounds.
Speaker 1: If talented women, minorities, and children from low income families
Speaker 1: could invent at the same rate as well off white men,
Speaker 1: Chetty and his co authors estimated these lost Einstein's could
Speaker 1: quadruple innovation in the US. An opportunity atlas on the
Speaker 1: Center's website maps income mobility across the US, down to
Speaker 1: the city, neighborhood and even block. The interact IF tool,
Speaker 1: built using anonymized data from the Census Bureau and the
Speaker 1: Internal Revenue Service, also pulls statistics on factors like teen pregnancy,
Speaker 1: incarceration rates, education levels, and commute times. The atlas, which
Speaker 1: went live in twenty eighteen, revealed but moving a child
Speaker 1: from a neighborhood with the low average mobility to one
Speaker 1: with above average mobility could boost his or her lifetime
Speaker 1: earnings by about two hundred thousand dollars. The project became
Speaker 1: the foundation for a Seattle area experiment in which families
Speaker 1: eligible for federal housing assistance received relocation advice and support.
Speaker 1: U S Senator Todd Young, a Republican, has co sponsored
Speaker 1: to buy partisan bill to take the Seattle program nationwide.
Speaker 1: Back home in Indiana, he borrows Chetty's charts to explain
Speaker 1: the issue to rooms full of constituents. Chetty goes to
Speaker 1: great lengths to make his research accessible. He's not just
Speaker 1: speaking to other researchers, Young says, he's presenting information in
Speaker 1: plain language in a visual for met that one can
Speaker 1: understand within seconds. Wealthy donors have also embraced Chetti's research.
Speaker 1: When he was lured back to Harvard two years ago
Speaker 1: from Stanford, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman endowed a
Speaker 1: chair in the Economics department for him. Gates, Zuckerberg, and
Speaker 1: other donors, including Bloomberg LP founder Mike Bloomberg, have given
Speaker 1: oh I resources that few academic labs can match. The
Speaker 1: center can hire not just research assistance to crunch data,
Speaker 1: but also experienced policy experts who turned findings into advice
Speaker 1: for decision makers at all levels of government and web
Speaker 1: designers who create ambitious data visualizations. He created a new
Speaker 1: business model for how to do economics, says Princeton professor
Speaker 1: Marcus Brundermeyer. Even for Chetty, whose work has documented in
Speaker 1: damning detail the many obstacles Black Americans face in this country.
Speaker 1: The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May
Speaker 1: inspired a reaction of horror about how different people's lives
Speaker 1: and be given just the color of their skin. He says,
Speaker 1: those differences are on full display on olies new tracker,
Speaker 1: which shows that as their jobs have disappeared and their
Speaker 1: children's education stalled, minorities and low income Americans have been
Speaker 1: bearing a disproportionate burden from the virus itself. It also
Speaker 1: won't help these groups that the disease is depriving governments
Speaker 1: of tax revenue and putting extreme strains on nonprofits and
Speaker 1: educational institutions. Many of the policies Chetty and his colleagues
Speaker 1: have suggested to battle inequality, such as more inclusive college
Speaker 1: admissions and housing desegregation, will require money to move forward.
Speaker 1: All of this is going to get tougher, says Friedman,
Speaker 1: Chetty's frequent collaborator, Ford's Walker is more optimistic. For the
Speaker 1: first time in my lifetime, we are reckoning with the
Speaker 1: issues of race and class in America. He says, Americans
Speaker 1: have deluded ourselves for years that we are a meritocracy.
Speaker 1: Now they're waking up to the often insurmountable barriers to
Speaker 1: equal opportunity. Jetty has spent his career identifying that makes
Speaker 1: him the economist for this moment of reckoning. Walker says
Speaker 1: he understands that growing inequality asphyxiates hope and makes it
Speaker 1: impossible for people to dream and believe that their children
Speaker 1: will have better lives. When COVID nineteen first reached the US,
Speaker 1: no one Chetty included had much idea of what it
Speaker 1: was doing to the economy. Government statistics like monthly unemployment
Speaker 1: numbers or the quarterly gross domestic products series couldn't keep up.
Speaker 1: Oh I had started the year with a full plate
Speaker 1: of projects, including Chetti's most ambitious data effort yet, a
Speaker 1: collaboration with the Census to document the economic trajectory of
Speaker 1: every American alive over the past seventy years. Suddenly, most
Speaker 1: of the lab's work ground to a halt as government
Speaker 1: offices shut down with little else to keep their young
Speaker 1: researchers busy, Chetty and his team started playing around with
Speaker 1: the few real time measures of the economy that were available.
Speaker 1: Home Base, a company that makes small business software, was
Speaker 1: offering researchers access to daily internal numbers, for example. During
Speaker 1: a meeting in early April, Chetty, Friedman, and others struck
Speaker 1: on an idea. What if they pulled together data from
Speaker 1: several private sources, then put it all up on the
Speaker 1: web so anyone could access it an economic counterpart to
Speaker 1: Johns Hopkins University's coronavirus tracker, which has become one of
Speaker 1: the go to sources for health statistics. We didn't realize
Speaker 1: just how big a project we were getting ourselves into,
Speaker 1: says Michael Stepner, a post doctoral fellow at oh I.
Speaker 1: At first, he planned to devote ten hours a week
Speaker 1: to the effort, but eventually it sucked in the entire staff,
Speaker 1: with work progressing pretty much around the clock as night
Speaker 1: owls overlapped with early birds. This just took over the lab,
Speaker 1: and it took over my life, says Stepner, who will
Speaker 1: DeCamp for a teaching job at the University of Toronto
Speaker 1: next year. The team initially vetted a Hodge ledge of
Speaker 1: data that might show COVID's effects on inequality, such as
Speaker 1: food pantry usage. Soon, though, they focused on building only
Speaker 1: the most rigorous and comprehensive metrics. Frequently cited as their
Speaker 1: inspiration is Simon Kuznets, the Nobel Prize winning economist who,
Speaker 1: in the depths of the Great Depression developed ways to
Speaker 1: quantify gross domestic product and other metrics. His pioneering work
Speaker 1: supplied the foundation for how the US and countries around
Speaker 1: the world measure their economies. Chetti set a similarly ambitious
Speaker 1: goal for his project, bring economic measurement into the age
Speaker 1: of big data. In today's world, almost every economic transaction,
Speaker 1: a debit card swipe, a direct deposit from an employer,
Speaker 1: an electronic bill of lading for a shipment of steel,
Speaker 1: has a digital fingerprint that's captured and stored somewhere. Pull
Speaker 1: enough of this data together, and in theory, you have
Speaker 1: a god's eye view of the economy. Imagine how useful
Speaker 1: that could be during a recession like this one. In
Speaker 1: place of the in size fits most policies and the
Speaker 1: Cares Act, lawmakers would be able to target stimulus with
Speaker 1: precision to the industries and sectors of the population that
Speaker 1: need it most and get nearly instantaneous feedback on whether
Speaker 1: it's working. And of course, there are applications beyond this pandemic.
Speaker 1: Using the tracker, a state hit by a natural disaster
Speaker 1: could pinpoint which communities were lagging in the recovery. A
Speaker 1: city trying to revive its downtown could get a rapid
Speaker 1: read on retail spending. Using private data to study economics
Speaker 1: isn't a new idea, but the COVID crisis gave Chetty
Speaker 1: the confidence that he might be able to pull off
Speaker 1: something unprecedented. Oh Eyes, major donors were enthusiastic. We see
Speaker 1: it as something that has a great deal of potential
Speaker 1: for the future, well beyond the current crisis, says Ryan Ripple,
Speaker 1: who oversees the Gates Foundation's work on economic mobility and opportunity.
Speaker 1: The first hurdle was persuading companies to part with as
Speaker 1: precious a possession as their internal data. Normally, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: have thought of approach big companies like into It or MasterCard,
Speaker 1: Chetti says, but the virus made them much more willing
Speaker 1: to help if we can figure out how to revive
Speaker 1: the economy. Obviously, that's good for everyone. Chetti's reputation and
Speaker 1: his years of experience in handling super secret government records
Speaker 1: reassured providers that their data would be properly aggregated, anonymized,
Speaker 1: and blended with other sets in ways that fully protected privacy.
Speaker 1: Raj's group is pretty advanced, says ram Polaniapin, chief executive
Speaker 1: officer of Ernin, which makes a financial app that's supplying
Speaker 1: information on wages of lower income workers. Ensuring that the
Speaker 1: individual streams of data could be pooled to render an
Speaker 1: accurate picture of the larger economy was its own challenge.
Speaker 1: The main issue when you get data from these private
Speaker 1: companies is that you're learning something about their business and
Speaker 1: not something about the economy as a whole, says Friedman,
Speaker 1: a co director of the Center. Some sources a debit
Speaker 1: card issuer, for example, were rejected as unrepresentative. Sometimes it
Speaker 1: worked and sometimes it didn't, and we tried to be
Speaker 1: creative about how to fill in the holes we needed.
Speaker 1: In May, after a five week marathon, o I launched
Speaker 1: the tracker, and the world got to see how jobs, spending,
Speaker 1: small business revenue, and other metrics responded to the onset
Speaker 1: of the pandemic in the US, Other academics started pouring
Speaker 1: through the rich data sets freely available for download to
Speaker 1: study everything from inflation to partisanship. States and local governments
Speaker 1: started consulting the Tracker to see which industries needed help.
Speaker 1: We literally use it every single day, says Rob Dixon,
Speaker 1: director of the Missouri Department of Economic Development. On the tracker,
Speaker 1: you can see that back in March when the lockdowns started,
Speaker 1: almost every household in America was reeling, with overall consumer
Speaker 1: spending plunging thirty three percent. Then around April fifteenth, spending surges,
Speaker 1: with bigger jumps in low income neighborhoods. That's the first
Speaker 1: round of stimulus payments landing in people's wallets as jobless
Speaker 1: benefits kick in, including the six dollars per week Pandemic
Speaker 1: top up that left many workers with more than they
Speaker 1: were earning before. Spending kept rising. By late June, residents
Speaker 1: of low income neighborhoods were spending a bit more than
Speaker 1: they had before the crisis, displayed on a map, though
Speaker 1: the Tracker data revealed some troubling patterns. In March and April,
Speaker 1: small businesses and affluent big city neighborhoods saw their revenue
Speaker 1: drop sev more than twice the decline in the least
Speaker 1: affluent areas saddled with high rents. Many of these shops, restaurants,
Speaker 1: and bars shut their doors for good. Because high income
Speaker 1: Americans make up such a large share of overall spending,
Speaker 1: the effects of their caution lingered even as cities and
Speaker 1: states allowed businesses to reopen. Using the tracker, you can
Speaker 1: compare neighboring states that reopened at different times, such as
Speaker 1: Colorado on May one and New Mexico on May sixte
Speaker 1: and see there's almost no difference in employment or consumers
Speaker 1: ending trajectories. Chetty grew even more alarmed as the summer
Speaker 1: wore on. His conversations with senators about the best ways
Speaker 1: to do another round of stimulus hadn't born fruit, with
Speaker 1: Congressional democrats insisting the economy needs far more support than
Speaker 1: Trump or Republicans have proposed. His conversations with senators about
Speaker 1: the best ways to do another round of stimulus hadn't
Speaker 1: born fruit, with congressional democrats insisting the economy needs far
Speaker 1: more support than Trump and Republicans have proposed. In early August,
Speaker 1: unemployed Americans stopped getting their extra six dollars a week.
Speaker 1: The tracker didn't show activity plummeting right away, as Chetty
Speaker 1: worried it might. Instead, measures like spending and small business
Speaker 1: revenue flatlined. We're basically stalled, he says. After the tracker's debut,
Speaker 1: oh I continued to sign up companies willing to share
Speaker 1: their data. There are eleven in total. Now what immerged
Speaker 1: it was an even clearer picture of the gaps opening
Speaker 1: between the most privileged Americans and everyone else. In August,
Speaker 1: payroll provider Paychecks offered data that, combined with info from Intuit, Urnin,
Speaker 1: and Chronos, revealed that high income workers had regained almost
Speaker 1: all the jobs lost in March and April. The findings
Speaker 1: Chetty shared with Biden and Harris that all the more
Speaker 1: heightens the need for targeted unemployment benefits. He says, the
Speaker 1: virus is spread, and the lack of a national strategy
Speaker 1: to fight it hobbled the economy in ways Chetty hadn't expected.
Speaker 1: After cases and deaths rose in places such as Florida
Speaker 1: and Arizona, key indicators like consumer spending and small business
Speaker 1: revenue dipped but didn't plunge. Why. Chetti's working theory is
Speaker 1: that Sunbelt states, economic resilience might be a sign that
Speaker 1: they're not taking the disease seriously enough to get it
Speaker 1: under control. Trying to keep the economy humming while the
Speaker 1: virus runs rampant is a short termist to prospect TV
Speaker 1: with long term costs. He says. A scenario in which
Speaker 1: COVID is never corralled the way it has been in
Speaker 1: some countries in Europe and Asia haunts Chetty. It's not
Speaker 1: going to be a sustained recovery. There's just no way,
Speaker 1: he says, We're going to be stuck trying to go
Speaker 1: along and accept a fair number of COVID infections and
Speaker 1: deaths and muddle our way through until finally there's a vaccine.
Speaker 1: This would be especially damaging for disadvantaged groups children, in particular,
Speaker 1: If schools can't reopen safely for in person learning, low
Speaker 1: income kids will fall even further behind their peers. The
Speaker 1: tracker includes one bit of non economic data from Zerne,
Speaker 1: a nonprofit online math platform, showing overall usage dropped when
Speaker 1: schools closed in March. Then, however, kids in high income
Speaker 1: areas product by well educated parents who were working from
Speaker 1: home started logging on again, completing more lessons in early
Speaker 1: May than they had before the crisis. By contrast, over
Speaker 1: all participation on ZERNE had dropped almost thirty percent, and
Speaker 1: by more than half for children in low income areas,
Speaker 1: possibly because they were in households where parents were more
Speaker 1: likely to be essential employees working outside the home. Public
Speaker 1: schools were to some extent, serving to level the playing
Speaker 1: field and increased social mobility. Chetty says, with the shift
Speaker 1: to mostly or only remote learning in many school districts,
Speaker 1: you're going to have massive impacts on inequality. Chetty doesn't
Speaker 1: pretend to have simple solusions to the COVID recession or
Speaker 1: to America's worsening inequality gap. What he has to offer
Speaker 1: are smaller, but often easier to implement fixes like the
Speaker 1: program in Seattle. Because of his scientific bent, he likes
Speaker 1: to see policies tested in one particular locale before they
Speaker 1: rolled out more widely. A lot of the solutions that
Speaker 1: are going to have the greatest impacts are going to
Speaker 1: be locally led and community created, says Repel of the
Speaker 1: Gates Foundation. Unlike some high profile economists who have strongly
Speaker 1: partisan viewpoints, Chetty doesn't ask elected leaders or their voters
Speaker 1: to abandon their political ideologies. He just tries to get
Speaker 1: them to pay attention to the people and places the
Speaker 1: economy has shunt to decide, We'll only see their suffering
Speaker 1: if we obsess less about aggregate measures like g d
Speaker 1: P and more about what's happening on street corners and
Speaker 1: in school yards, where Americans are blocked from reaching their potential.
Speaker 1: To figure out how to restore opportunity for the disadvantaged,
Speaker 1: Chetty will need lots more data, so he's still on
Speaker 1: the hunt for fresh inputs for his tracker, better ways
Speaker 1: to measure cash transactions, health care spending, housing costs, and
Speaker 1: the balance sheets of businesses and households. The more data
Speaker 1: you have, the more it brings to light the interconnected
Speaker 1: nature of the economy, he says. Be sure to check
Speaker 1: out more stories in our Equality Issue. Find that issue
Speaker 1: on newsstands, also online in at Bloomberg Dot comment of course,
Speaker 1: Jason always on the Bloomberg terminal. That's a eight one.
Speaker 1: I'm Carol Masser and I'm Jason Kelly. Also check us
Speaker 1: out every day on the radio are Bloomberg Business Week
Speaker 1: Show at two p m. Wall Street Time. This is Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: We've wrapped up an incredible week of content at the
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Green Festival. Access interviews with our speakers including Matt Damon,
Speaker 1: Sophie Beckham, Ted Danson, Bill Gates, Christianna Fagadis, Robert Redford
Speaker 1: and many more on demand at Bloomberg Live, dot com,
Speaker 1: Slash Green, Slash Radio. Thank you to our sponsors Festival
Speaker 1: founding partners Amazon, HP and j l L, presenting sponsor Eberdrola,
Speaker 1: and supporting sponsor e C MWF Copernicus Services