The assignment requires students to write a thesis-driven essay that answers a research question related to the American Dream by synthesizing at least four credible sources. The goal is to contribute to an academic conversation by presenting an original argument based on research and analysis. The essay must adhere to MLA formatting and incorporates a peer review process before final submission.

1. Essay 3: Research Argument (Synthesis)
Assignment Objectives
Students will complete this assignment by writing an essay that
makes an original argument that answers the research question
that they have already developed and researched in the previous
assignment (which was a Review of Literature). Students’
essays should 1) have a thesis statement 2) support the
argument presented in the thesis by synthesizing at least four
sources that the student has found and evaluated as credible or
otherwise worthy of attention; and 3) summarize, paraphrase,
and quote from these sources adequately to complete the task.
Rationale
The simplest explanation of this essay’s purpose is that by
completing it, you will write an essay that answers your
research question. Ultimately, however, the purpose of this
assignment is to enter a scholarly conversation. By applying the
skills in research, source evaluation, and synthesis that you
have been practicing through the term, you will contribute to an
existing conversation by presenting your own original argument.
That argument will speak to the existing conversation by using
sources to support your argument (either as evidence, by
extending or modifying your sources’ arguments, or by refuting
sources’ arguments). The most important thing to remember as
you work on this essay is that you cannot simply parrot the
information or arguments that you find in your sources. Rather,
this essay will be driven by your unique argument answering
your research question. Your essay must be a persuasive
argument that allows you as a young scholar to enter and
contribute to the ongoing conversation on your topic.

2. Assignment
In short, this assignment requires you to write a thesis-driven
essay that makes an argument answering your research question
that cites at least four sources to support your claims and show
your thesis’s relationship to the existing conversation on your
topic. Suitable questions might be:
What is the definition of the American Dream?
Is the American Dream positive or negative in its impact
on American culture?
Is the American Dream real or just a myth?
Is the American Dream dead or alive?
Only one question should be dealt with in this paper. Any of
these questions may be modified as long as they are approved
by the instructor in the planning stage.
Suggestion for Process
1. Read and annotate the articles.
2. Identify a question that arises from your reading (either taken
from the suggested list or modified from the list).
3. Determine your answer to the question based on your reading
and experience and form a thesis statement.
4. Identify from three to four supporting points or reasons that
back up your thesis.
5. Use ideas from four or more sources to establish the
credibility of your researched argument.
6. Write a two level outline for a 5 page persuasive paper that
advocates for your ideas.
7. Write a first draft of a 5 page persuasive paper that advocates
for your answer to your research question. Document any use of
sources in MLA format. Submit this to D2L a day before peer
review.
8. The day before the Peer Review, request a Peer Review
partner from the instructor. The instructor will email an SSU

3. email address and the name of your assigned partner. A copy of
the Peer Review rubric will also be attached. Send your First
Draft to the partner; they will complete the Peer Review and
take a picture of their completed review and send it to you via
email. This picture will also be sent to the professor as proof of
the completion of the assignment.
9. Use the feedback obtained from D2L and the peer review to
write a Polished draft. Submit the Polished draft to D2L on
April 23.
10. Once a grade has been given to the paper in D2L, improve
the paper and resubmit it in D2L under the Improved Draft drop
box by April 28.
Rhetorical Situation
The audience for this paper is someone who has some
familiarity with the concept of the American Dream. Your
purpose is to advocate for a specific answer or position
concerning a question relating to the topic of the American
Dream. This is an academic exercise and Standard American
English should be used as well as MLA format. Academic
writing should not use second person pronouns and only use
first person when the rhetorical situation is personal. This paper
is not personal in nature; therefore, first person pronouns should
also not be used.
Do I need a Works Cited Page?
Because you will be quoting, paraphrase, and summarizing from
your sources, you will need to parenthetically cite them in your
essay. You will also need an MLA works cited page which lists
all sources used in the paper. Please ask if you have questions
regarding citation, and remember that all essays will go through
the Turnitin Originality Check in the D2L Dropbox.

4. Last Name 1
Title of Paper
Thesis:
Topic Sentence for Main Point 1
Support Statement 1
Support Statement 2Topic Sentence for Main Point 2
Support Statement 1
Support Statement 2
Last Name 1
Title of Paper
Thesis:
Topic Sentence for Main Point 1
Support Statement 1Detail 1Detail 2
Support Statement 2Detail 1Detail 2Topic Sentence for Main
Point 2
Support Statement 1Detail 1Detail 2
Support Statement 2Detail 1Detail 2Topic Sentence for Main
Point 2

5. Support Statement 1Detail 1Detail 2
Support Statement 2Detail 1Detail 2
THE ATLANTIC
“The Economist Who Would Fix the American Dream”
Story by Gareth Cook
August 2019
Updated at 3:47 p.m. ET on July 17, 2019.
Raj chetty got his biggest break before his life began. His
mother, Anbu, grew up in Tamil Nadu, a tropical state at the
southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Anbu showed the
greatest academic potential of her five siblings, but her future
was constrained by custom. Although Anbu’s father encouraged
her scholarly inclinations, there were no colleges in the area,
and sending his daughter away for an education would have
been unseemly.To hear more feature stories, see our full
list or get the Audm iPhone app.
But as Anbu approached the end of high school, a minor miracle
redirected her life. A local tycoon, himself the father of a bright
daughter, decided to open a women’s college, housed in his
elegant residence. Anbu was admitted to the inaugural class of
30 young women, learning English in the spacious courtyard
under a thatched roof and traveling in the early mornings by bus
to a nearby college to run chemistry experiments or dissect
frogs’ hearts before the men arrived. Anbu excelled, and so
began a rapid upward trajectory. She enrolled in medical school.
“Why,” her father was asked, “do you send her there?” Among
their Chettiar caste, husbands commonly worked abroad for
years at a time, sending back money, while wives were left to
raise the children. What use would a medical degree be to a
stay-at-home mother?

6. In 1962, Anbu married Veerappa Chetty, a brilliant man from
Tamil Nadu whose mother and grandmother had sometimes
eaten less food so there would be more for him. Anbu became a
doctor and supported her husband while he earned a doctorate in
economics. By 1979, when Raj was born in New Delhi, his
mother was a pediatrics professor and his father was an
economics professor who had served as an adviser to Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi.
When Chetty was 9, his family moved to the United States, and
he began a climb nearly as dramatic as that of his parents. He
was the valedictorian of his high-school class, then graduated in
just three years from Harvard University, where he went on to
earn a doctorate in economics and, at age 28, was among the
youngest faculty members in the university’s history to be
offered tenure. In 2012, he was awarded the MacArthur genius
grant. The following year, he was given the John Bates Clark
Medal, awarded to the most promising economist under 40. (He
was 33 at the time.) In 2015, Stanford University hired him
away. Last summer, Harvard lured him back to launch his own
research and policy institute, with funding from the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Chetty turns 40 this month, and is widely considered to be one
of the most influential social scientists of his generation. “The
question with Raj,” says Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, one of the
country’s leading urban economists, “is not if he will win a
Nobel Prize, but when.”
The work that has brought Chetty such fame is an echo of his
family’s history. He has pioneered an approach that uses newly
available sources of government data to show how American
families fare across generations, revealing striking patterns of
upward mobility and stagnation. In one early study, he showed
that children born in 1940 had a 90 percent chance of earning
more than their parents, but for children born four decades later,
that chance had fallen to 50 percent, a toss of a coin.

7. In 2013, Chetty released a colorful map of the United States,
showing the surprising degree to which people’s financial
prospects depend on where they happen to grow up. In Salt Lake
City, a person born to a family in the bottom fifth of household
income had a 10.8 percent chance of reaching the top fifth. In
Milwaukee, the odds were less than half that.
Chetty at age 9. He was later valedictorian of his high school,
and he went on to earn an undergraduate degree and a doctorate
in economics from Harvard University. At age 28, he was
among the youngest faculty members in the university’s history
to be offered tenure.
Since then, each of his studies has become a front-page media
event (“Chetty bombs,” one collaborator calls them) that
combines awe—millions of data points, vivid infographics, a
countrywide lens—with shock. This may not be the America
you’d like to imagine, the statistics testify, but it’s what we’ve
allowed America to become. Dozens of the nation’s elite
colleges have more children of the 1 percent than from families
in the bottom 60 percent of family income. A black boy born to
a wealthy family is more than twice as likely to end up poor as
a white boy from a wealthy family. Chetty has established Big
Data as a moral force in the American debate.
Now he wants to do more than change our understanding of
America—he wants to change America itself. His new Harvard-
based institute, called Opportunity Insights, is explicitly aimed
at applying his findings in cities around the country and
demonstrating that social scientists, despite a discouraging track
record, are able to fix the problems they articulate in journals.
His staff includes an eight-person policy team, which is
building partnerships with Charlotte, Seattle, Detroit,
Minneapolis, and other cities.
For a man who has done so much to document the country’s
failings, Chetty is curiously optimistic. He has the confidence
of a scientist: If a phenomenon like upward mobility can be

8. measured with enough precision, then it can be understood; if it
can be understood, then it can be manipulated. “The big-picture
goal,” Chetty told me, “is to revive the American dream.”
Last summer, I visited Opportunity Insights on its opening day.
The offices are housed on the second floor of a brick building,
above a café and across Massachusetts Avenue from Harvard’s
columned Widener Library. Chetty arrived in econ-casual: a
lilac dress shirt, no jacket, black slacks. He is tall and trim,
with an untroubled air; he smiled as he greeted two of his
longtime collaborators—the Brown University economist John
Friedman and Harvard’s Nathaniel Hendren. They walked him
around, showing off the finished space, done in a modern
palette of white, wood, and aluminum with accent walls of
yellow and sage.
Later, after Chetty and his colleagues had finished giving a day
of seminars to their new staff, I caught up with him in his
office, which was outfitted with a pristine whiteboard, an
adjustable-height desk, and a Herman Miller chair that still had
the tags attached. The first time I’d met him, at an economics
conference, he had told me he was one of several cousins on his
mother’s side who go by Raj, all named after their grandfather,
Nadarajan, all with sharp minds and the same long legs and easy
gait. Yet of Nadarajan’s children, only Chetty’s mother
graduated from college, and he’s certain that this fact shaped
his generation’s possibilities. He was able to come to the United
States as a child and attend an elite private school, the
University School of Milwaukee. New York Raj—the family
appends a location to keep them straight—came to the U.S. later
in life, at age 28, worked in drugstores, and then took a series
of jobs with the City of New York. Singapore Raj found a job in
a temple there that allows him to support his family back in
India, but means they must live apart. Karaikudi Raj, named for
the town where his mother grew up, committed suicide as a
teenager.

9. “We are not trying to do something that is unimaginable or has
never happened,” Chetty told me. “It happens just down the
road.”
I asked Boston Raj to consider what might have become of him
if that wealthy Indian businessman had not decided, in the
precise year his mother was finishing high school, to create a
college for the talented women of southeastern Tamil Nadu. “I
would likely not be here,” he said, thinking for a moment. “To
put it another way: Who are all the people who are not here,
who would have been here if they’d had the opportunities? That
is a really good question.”
Charlotte is one of America’s great urban success stories. In the
1970s, it was a modest-size city left behind as the textile
industry that had defined North Carolina moved overseas. But in
the 1980s, the “Queen City” began to lift itself up. US Airways
established a hub at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport,
and the region became a major transportation and distribution
center. Bank of America built its headquarters there, and today
Charlotte is in a dead heat with San Francisco to be the nation’s
second-largest banking center, after New York. New
skyscrapers have sprouted downtown, and the city boundary has
been expanding, replacing farmland with spacious homes and
Whole Foods stores. In the past four decades, Charlotte’s
population has nearly tripled.
Charlotte has also stood out in Chetty’s research, though not in
a good way. In a 2014 analysis of the country’s 50 largest
metropolitan areas, Charlotte ranked last in ability to lift up
poor children. Only 4.4 percent of Charlotte’s kids moved from
the bottom quintile of household income to the top. Kids born
into low-income families earned just $26,000 a year, on
average, as adults—perched on the poverty line. “It was
shocking,” says Brian Collier, an executive vice president of the

10. Foundation for the Carolinas, which is working with
Opportunity Insights. “The Charlotte story is that we are a
meritocracy, that if you come here and are smart and motivated,
you will have every opportunity to achieve greatness.” The
city’s true story, Chetty’s data showed, is of selective
opportunity: All the data-scientist and business-development-
analyst jobs in the thriving banking sector are a boon for out-of-
towners and the progeny of the well-to-do, but to grow up poor
in Charlotte is largely to remain poor.
To help cities like Charlotte, Chetty takes inspiration from
medicine. For thousands of years, he explained, little progress
was made in understanding disease, until technologies like the
microscope gave scientists novel ways to understand biology,
and thus the pathologies that make people ill. In October,
Chetty’s institute released an interactive map of the United
States called the Opportunity Atlas, revealing the terrain of
opportunity down to the level of individual neighborhoods.
This, he says, will be his microscope.
Drawing on anonymized government data over a three-decade
span, the researchers linked children to the parents who claimed
them as dependents. The atlas then followed poor kids from
every census tract in the country, showing how much they went
on to earn as adults. The colors on the atlas reveal a
generation’s prospects: red for areas where kids fared the worst;
shades of orange, yellow, and green for middling locales; and
blue for spots like Salt Lake City’s Foothill neighborhood,
where upward mobility is strongest. It can also track children
born into higher income brackets, compare results by race and
gender, and zoom out to show states, regions, or the country as
a whole.
The Opportunity Atlas has a fractal quality. Some regions of the
United States look better than high-mobility countries such as
Denmark, while others look more like a developing country.

11. The Great Plains unfurl as a sea of blue, and then the eye is
caught by an island of red—a mark of the miseries inflicted on
the Oglala Lakota by European settlers. These stark differences
recapitulate themselves on smaller and smaller scales as you
zoom in. It’s common to see opposite extremes of opportunity
within easy walking distance of each other, even in two
neighborhoods that long-term residents would consider quite
similar.
To find a cure for what ails America, Chetty will need to
understand all of this wild variation. Which factors foster
opportunity, and which impede it? The next step will be to find
local interventions that can address these factors—and to prove,
with experimental trials, that the interventions work. The end
goal is the social equivalent of precision medicine: a method for
diagnosing the particular weaknesses of a place and prescribing
a set of treatments. This could transform neighborhoods, and
restore the American dream from the ground up.
If all of this seems impossibly ambitious, Chetty’s
counterargument is to point to how the blue is marbled in with
the red. “We are not trying to do something that is unimaginable
or has never happened,” he told me over lunch one day. “It
happens just down the road.”
Yet in Charlotte, where Opportunity Insights hopes to build its
proof of concept, the atlas reveals swaths of bleak uniformity.
Looking at the city, you first see a large bluish wedge south of
downtown, with Providence Road on one side and South
Boulevard on the other, encompassing the mostly white, mostly
affluent areas where children generally grow up to do well.
Surrounding the wedge is a broad expanse in hues of red that
locals call “the crescent,” made up of predominantly black
neighborhoods where the prospects for poor children are pretty
miserable. Hunger and homelessness are common, and in some
places only one in five high-school students scores “proficient”
on standardized tests. In many parts of the crescent, the

12. question isn’t What’s holding kids back? so much as What isn’t
holding them back? It’s hard to know where to start.
The most significant challenge Chetty faces is the force of
history. In the 1930s, redlining prevented black families from
buying homes in Charlotte’s more desirable neighborhoods. In
the 1940s, the city built Independence Boulevard, a four-lane
highway that cut through the heart of its Brooklyn
neighborhood, dividing and displacing a thriving working-class
black community. The damage continued in the ’60s and ’70s
with new interstates. It’s common to hear that something has
gone wrong in parts of Charlotte, but the more honest reading is
that Charlotte is working as it was designed to. American cities
are the way they are, and remain the way they are, because of
choices they have made and continue to make.
Does a professor from Harvard, even one as influential and well
funded as Chetty, truly stand any chance of bending the
American story line? On his national atlas, the most obvious
feature is an ugly red gash that starts in Virginia, curls down
through the Southeast’s coastal states—North Carolina, South
Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama—then marches west toward the
Mississippi River, where it turns northward before petering out
in western Tennessee. When I saw this, I was reminded of
another map: one President Abraham Lincoln consulted in 1861,
demarcating the counties with the most slaves. The two maps
are remarkably similar. Set the documents side by side, and it
may be hard to believe that they are separated in time by more
than a century and a half, or that one is a rough census of men
and women kept in bondage at the time of the Civil War, and
the other is a computer-generated glimpse of our children’s
future.
{To see all charts and maps, use the link in the list of links to
readings}
Top: A map consulted by President Lincoln in 1861,

13. demarcating the counties with the most slaves. (Library of
Congress)
Bottom: A detail from Chetty’s Opportunity Atlas, in which
areas with poor upward mobility are shown in red. The
similarities between the two documents suggest that it will be
difficult for Chetty to change the landscape of opportunity.
(Opportunity Insights / U.S. Census Bureau)
In 2003, after earning his doctorate, Chetty moved to UC
Berkeley for his first job. He was, at the time, the only person
in his immediate family—his parents and two older sisters, both
biomedical researchers—who had not published a paper.
Education was highly prized. He was taught that it would be
sacrilege to ever step on a book. When he visits his parents at
their home, north of Boston, his mother still makes him a
favorite dish with bhindi (Hindi for “okra”), which, she told me,
is supposed to be good for the brain.
Both of Chetty’s parents descend from the Chettiar caste, a
mercantile group historically involved in banking, and the kids
were raised to carry on their cultural heritage. They learned
Tamil in addition to Hindi. Chetty’s sisters married men with
Chettiar backgrounds. Chetty rejects the caste system, though
he first met his wife, Sundari, after one of his sisters got to
know her through the Chettiar community. (Sundari is a stem-
cell biologist.)
Chetty had always been drawn to public economics—the study
of government policy and how it might be improved. And, as it
happened, he was embarking on his career as a revolution in the
field was under way. In the past, economists had to rely heavily
on surveys, but the advent of cheap, powerful computing
allowed for a new kind of economics—one that drew on the
extensive administrative data gathered by governments. Survey
participants number in the hundreds or thousands;
administrative data can yield records in the hundreds of
millions.

14. In November 2007, Chetty came across an ad from the IRS
seeking help organizing its electronic files into a format that
would be easier to use for research. He immediately recognized
that completing the job would make it possible for scholars to
go far deeper into tax data. He and John Friedman began the
process of registering to be federal contractors—which
involved, among other things, certifying that their workplace
met federal safety standards, and calling on Friedman’s brother,
who lived in Washington, D.C., to take a cab out to Maryland to
hand-deliver their application materials, in triplicate.
Like many good ideas, the project seems obvious in retrospect,
but the truth is that nobody could have known how useful the
data would prove to be—and it worked only because Chetty and
his colleagues have an almost superhuman degree of patience.
Nathaniel Hendren, who has known Chetty for seven years, told
me he’s never seen Chetty happier than one Friday evening in
the summer of 2014, when they were sitting in some IRS
cubicles at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in downtown
Boston. (The only way to access the government’s data was
inside a federal building, on secure servers, with the computers
logging their requests.) That night, Chetty and Hendren were
wrestling with thousands of lines of code designed to pull
together responses scattered across hundreds of millions of
1040s, W2s, and other forms (taxpayer names are kept separate
to protect privacy), while ensuring that nothing in the code
introduced errors or subtle biases. At some point, Hendren
recalled, he heard Chetty yell “Sweet!” Hendren looked over
and Chetty, smiling, explained that his flight out of Logan
airport that night had just been delayed: more time to work.
Over the past two decades, economists have tried to structure
their work, as much as possible, to resemble scientific
experiments. This “credibility revolution” is an attempt to
explicitly link causes to effects, and sweep aside the old

15. criticism that correlation is not the same as causation. One of
the advantages of the large tax database Chetty and his
colleagues constructed is that it allows “quasi-experiments”—
clever statistical methods that approach the power of a true
experiment without requiring a researcher to, say, randomly
assign children to live in different cities.
For example, Chetty and Hendren looked at children who
changed cities. They found that the later a child moved to a
higher-opportunity area, the less effect the move seemed to
have on future earnings. But they also devised additional tests
to ensure that the effect was causal, such as looking at siblings
who moved at the same time: a quasi-experiment in which two
children grew up in the same family, but were exposed to a new
area for a shorter or longer period depending on their age at the
time of the move. The result was a highly credible conclusion,
based on millions of data points, that moving a child to a better
neighborhood boosts his or her future income—and the younger
the child, the greater the benefit.
There was, however, a significant problem: Their conclusion
contradicted one of the most influential poverty experiments of
recent decades. In the 1990s, the federal government launched
Moving to Opportunity, a program designed to relocate families
living in public housing to safer neighborhoods, where they had
access to better jobs and schools. Thousands of families in five
cities were randomly selected to receive housing vouchers and
support services to help them move to lower-poverty areas.
After a decade of study, researchers concluded that while these
“mover” families experienced some physical and mental-health
benefits, test scores among the kids didn’t rise, and there were
no signs of financial benefit for adults or older children.
In 2014, Chetty, Hendren, and the Harvard economist Lawrence
Katz asked the IRS and the Department of Housing and Urban
Development, which had overseen the program, for permission

16. to take another look at what had happened to the children. When
the earlier follow-up had been done, the youngest kids, who had
moved before they were teenagers, had not yet reached their
earning years, and this turned out to make all the difference.
This young group of movers, the economists found, had gone on
to earn 31 percent more than those who hadn’t moved, and 4
percent more of them attended college. They calculated that for
an 8-year-old child, the value of the extra future earnings over a
lifetime was almost $100,000, a substantial sum for a poor
family. For a family with two children, the taxes paid on the
extra income more than covered the costs of the program. “The
big insight,” Kathryn Edin, a sociology professor at Princeton,
told me, “is that it took a generation for the effects to
manifest.”
Last july, I took a tour of Charlotte with David Williams, the
34-year-old policy director of Opportunity Insights and the man
responsible for translating Chetty’s research into action on the
ground. Williams and members of his team crammed into the
back of a white Ford Explorer with color printouts of various
Charlotte neighborhoods as they appear on the atlas. Brian
Collier, of the Foundation for the Carolinas, sat in the front
seat, serving as a guide.
As the driver headed northeast, the high-rises of “Uptown”
shifted abruptly to low-slung buildings and chain-link fences.
Collier pointed out a men’s shelter in the rapidly gentrifying
neighborhood of Lockwood, where he’d recently seen a drug
deal go down a block away from a house that had sold for half a
million dollars.
We continued on to Brightwalk, a new mixed-income
development with long rows of townhomes, before turning west
for a loop around West Charlotte High School, a once-lauded
model of successful integration. In the 1990s, though, support
for busing waned, and in 1999, a judge declared that race could

17. not be used as a factor in school assignment. Now the student
population is virtually all minority and overwhelmingly poor,
and the surrounding neighborhood is deep red on the atlas. The
homes are neat, one-story single families, a tad rough around
the edges but nothing like the burnt-out buildings in Detroit,
where Williams previously worked on economic development
for the mayor. “It reminds you how hard it is to tell where real
opportunity is,” Williams said. “You can’t just see it.”
Opportunity is not the same as affluence. Consider a kid who
grows up in a household earning about $27,000 annually, right
at the 25th percentile nationally. In Beverly Woods, a relatively
wealthy, mostly white enclave in South Charlotte with spacious,
well-kept yards, he could expect his household income to be
$42,900 by age 35. Yet in Huntersville, an attractive northern
suburb with nearly the same average household income as
Beverly Woods, a similar kid could expect only $24,800—a
stark difference, invisible to a passing driver.
This dynamic also functions in poorer areas. For a child in Reid
Park, an African American neighborhood on the west side of
Charlotte, near the airport—a place that has struggled to recover
from a crime epidemic in the 1980s—the expected household
income at age 35 is a dismal $17,800, on average. But in East
Forest, a white, working-class neighborhood in southeast
Charlotte, the expected future income jumps to $32,600.
There are places like East Forest in cities around the country.
Chetty and his team have taken to calling them “opportunity
bargains”: places with relatively affordable rents that punch
above their weight with respect to opportunity. He doesn’t yet
know why some places are opportunity bargains, but he
considers the discovery of these neighborhoods to be a
breakthrough. John Friedman told me that if the government had
been able to move families to opportunity-bargain
neighborhoods in the original Moving to Opportunity
experiment—places selected for higher opportunity, not lower

18. poverty—the children’s earnings improvements would have
been more than twice as great.
In the crimson sectors of Chetty’s atlas, the problem is both the
absence of opportunity and the presence of its opposite: swift
currents that can drag a person down.
Chetty’s team has already begun to apply this concept in
another of its partner cities, Seattle, working with two local
housing authorities to navigate the thorny process of translating
research into measurable social change. It’s hard for poor
families to manage an expansive housing search, which requires
time, transportation, and decent credit. The group created a
program with “housing navigators,” who point participants
toward areas with relatively high opportunity, help with credit-
related issues, and even give neighborhood tours. Landlords
need encouragement as well. They can be wary of tenants
bearing vouchers, which mean government oversight and
paperwork. The Seattle program has streamlined this process,
and offers free damage insurance to sweeten the deal.
Tenants have just started moving, but the program is already
successful: The majority of families who received assistance
moved to high-opportunity areas, compared with one-fifth for
the control group, which was not provided with the extra
services. Chetty estimates that the program will increase each
child’s lifetime earnings by $88,000. In February, President
Donald Trump signed into law a bill that provides $28 million
to try similar experimental programs in other locations. The bill
enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support, and this spring
Chetty was invited to brief the Department of Housing and
Urban Development. He told me he’s hopeful that the program
can be expanded to the 2.2 million families that receive HUD
housing vouchers every year. “Then you’d actually be doing
something about poverty in the American city,” he said. “What I
like about this is it’s not some pie-in-the-sky thing. We have

19. something that works.”
Charlotte is among the cities interested in implementing the
Seattle strategy, but officials also want to use the atlas to select
better building sites for affordable housing. In the past, much of
the city’s affordable housing was constructed in what Chetty’s
data reveal to be high-poverty, low-opportunity areas. “Let’s
not just think about building X units of new affordable
housing,” Williams said. “Let’s really leverage housing policy
as part of a larger economic-mobility agenda for the
community.”
Opportunity bargains, however, are not an inexhaustible
resource. The crucial question, says the Berkeley economist
Enrico Moretti, is whether the opportunity in these places
derives from “rival goods”—institutions, such as schools, with
limited capacity—or “non-rival goods,” such as local culture,
which are harder to deplete. When new people move in, what
happens to opportunity? And even if an influx of families
doesn’t disrupt the opportunity magic, people aren’t always
eager to pick up and leave their homes. Moving breaks ties with
family, friends, schools, churches, and other organizations.
“The real conundrum is how to address the larger structural
realities of inequality,” says the Harvard sociologist Robert
Sampson, “and not just try to move people around.”
For all he’s learned about where opportunity resides in
America, Chetty knows surprisingly little about what makes one
place better than another. He and Hendren have gathered a
range of social-science data sets and looked for correlations to
the atlas. The high-opportunity places, they’ve found, tend to
share five qualities: good schools, greater levels of social
cohesion, many two-parent families, low levels of income
inequality, and little residential segregation, by either class or
race. The list is suggestive, but hard to interpret.

20. For example, the strongest correlation is the number of intact
families. The explanation seems obvious: A second parent
usually means higher family income as well as more stability, a
broader social network, additional emotional support, and many
other intangibles. Yet children’s upward mobility was strongly
correlated with two-parent families only in the neighborhood,
not necessarily in their home. There are so many things the data
might be trying to say. Maybe fathers in a neighborhood serve
as mentors and role models? Or maybe there is no causal
connection at all. Perhaps, for example, places with strong
church communities help kids while also fostering strong
marriages. The same kinds of questions flow from every
correlation; each one may mean many things. What is cause,
what is effect, and what are we missing? Chetty’s microscope
has revealed a new world, but not what animates it—or how to
change it.
Chetty has found that opportunity does not correlate with many
traditional economic measures, such as employment or wage
growth. In the search for opportunity’s cause, he is instead
focusing on an idea borrowed from sociology: social capital.
The term refers broadly to the set of connections that ease a
person’s way through the world, providing support and
inspiration and opening doors.
Chetty believes that if upward mobility can be measured with
enough precision, it can be understood. “The big-picture goal,”
he told me, “is to revive the American dream.” (Carlos
Chavarría)
Economics has long played the role of sociology’s annoying
older brother—conventionally accomplished and wholeheartedly
confident, unaware of what he doesn’t know, while still
commanding everyone’s attention. Chetty, though, is part of a
younger generation of scholars who have embraced a style of
quantitative social science that crosses old disciplinary lines.

21. There are strong hints in his research that social capital and
mobility are intimately connected; even a crude measure of
social capital, such as the number of bowling alleys in a
neighborhood, seems to track with opportunity. His data also
suggest that who you know growing up can have lasting effects.
A paper on patents he co-authored found that young women
were more likely to become inventors if they’d moved as
children to places where many female inventors lived. (The
number of male inventors had little effect.) Even which fields
inventors worked in was heavily influenced by what was being
invented around them as children. Those who grew up in the
Bay Area had some of the highest rates of patenting in
computers and related fields, while those who spent their
childhood in Minneapolis, home of many medical-device
manufacturers, tended to invent drugs and medical
devices.* Chetty is currently working with data from Facebook
and other social-media platforms to quantify the links between
opportunity and our social networks.
Sociologists embrace many ways of understanding the world.
They shadow people and move into communities, wondering
what they might find out. They collect data and do quantitative
analysis and read economics papers, but their work is also
informed by psychology and cultural studies. “When you are
released from the harsh demands of experiment, you are allowed
to make new discoveries and think more freely about what is
going on,” says David Grusky, a Stanford sociology professor
who collaborates with Chetty. I asked Princeton’s Edin what she
thought would end up being the one thing that best explains the
peaks and valleys of American opportunity. She said her best
guess is “some kind of social glue”—the ties that bind people,
fostered by well-functioning institutions, whether they are
mosques or neighborhood soccer leagues. The staff at
Opportunity Insights has learned: When an economist gets lost,
a sociologist can touch his elbow and say, You know, I’ve been
noticing some things.

22. In charlotte, Chetty still aspires to practice “precision
medicine,” but he told me his initial goal is more modest: to see
whether he and his team can find anything that helps.
Opportunity Insights is planning housing and higher-education
initiatives, but social capital is at the center of its approach. It
is working with a local organization called Leading on
Opportunity, and looking at nonprofits that are already
operating successfully, including Communities in Schools, a
national group that provides comprehensive student support, as
well as a job-training program called Year Up. Chetty is also
using tax data to measure the long-term impacts of dozens of
place-based interventions, such as enterprise zones, which use
tax and other incentives to draw businesses into economically
depressed areas. (He expects to see initial results from these
analyses later this year.) Chetty may not have many answers
yet, but he is convinced that this combination of data,
collaboration, and fieldwork will make it possible to move from
educated guesses to tailored prescriptions. “There are points
when the pieces come together,” Chetty told me. “My instinct is
that in social science, this generation is when that is going to
happen.”
Chetty’s pitch to the nation is that our problems have
technocratic solutions, but at times I sense that he is avoiding
an argument. Surely our neighborhoods can be improved, and
those improvements can help the next generation achieve better
outcomes. But what of the larger forces driving the enormous
disparities in American wealth? Poor people would be better off
if their children had better prospects, but also if they had more
money—if the fruits of our society were shared more broadly. “I
can take money from you and give it to me, and maybe that is
good and maybe it is not,” he said. “I feel like there are a lot of
people working on redistribution, and it is hard to figure out the
right answer there.” To focus on the question of who gets what
is also, of course, politically incendiary.

23. Chetty believes there is more progress to be made through a
moral framing that is less partisan. “There are so many kids out
there who could be doing so many great things, both for
themselves and for the world,” he said. Chetty’s challenge to
the system is measured and empirical; it’s one that billionaires
and corporations can happily endorse. But his stance is also a
simple matter of personality: Chetty is no agitator. He told me,
“I like to find solutions that please everyone in the room, and
this definitely has that feel.”
In Charlotte, even the circumscribed version of social change
that Chetty is attempting looks daunting. Last summer, before
the Opportunity Insights team came to town, I drove around to
the back of West Charlotte High School, to a hamlet of pale-
yellow temporary-classroom buildings, each set on concrete
blocks. One building has been given over to Eliminate the
Digital Divide, known as E2D, a nonprofit that takes donations
of old laptops, then refurbishes and distributes them for $60
apiece to students who have no computer of their own.
According to E2D, half of the county’s public-school students
have been unable to complete a homework assignment because
they don’t have access to a computer or the internet.
Inside the E2D building is a bright room ringed by a series of
workstations where West Charlotte student-employees inspect
laptops, set up hard drives, and test the final products.
Whiteboards, photos, and posters with inspirational phrases
like college bound! cover the walls. By the door, a pair of
yellow couches serve as a waiting area. When the boys get their
computers, they work hard to suppress a smile, whereas the
girls are prone to let loose. Sometimes they jump up and down,
and sometimes they cry.
I met Kalijah Jones, a young black woman in a pale-pink
sleeveless blouse and matching skirt. She had started working at
E2D during her senior year, in 2017. Not long into our

24. conversation, she said, “I love my life!”—this despite the fact
that she was living in a homeless shelter at the time.
For Jones, the biggest benefit brought by E2D was not the
computer or the job, but the social capital the program
provided. Last year, she said, E2D’s West Charlotte lab was
recognized with a local technology award, and the founder
invited Jones and some of her co-workers to join him for the
awards ceremony at the Knight Theater, where the Charlotte
Ballet performs. One of the other honorees was Road to Hire, a
program that pays high-school graduates as it trains them for
jobs in sales and tech. The head of Road to Hire was at the
ceremony, and he gave Jones a business card, which led to a
paid spot in the program’s training program.
But in the crimson sectors of Chetty’s atlas, the problem is both
the absence of opportunity and the presence of its opposite:
swift currents that can drag a person down. There are, in these
places, a few narrow paths to success, and 99 ways to falter.
Jones made it through high school despite living in a shelter,
and was accepted to Western Carolina University with financial
aid. But she decided not to go, in part because she couldn’t
imagine leaving her struggling mother and sister behind to live
on a campus three hours away. Last winter, the three of them
left Charlotte, and the prospects that were beginning to open up
for Jones there, and moved to New Jersey, where she grew up.
When I last spoke with her, she’d found work at an Amazon
warehouse.
One friday evening, I was in Chetty’s Stanford office when a
ballerina arrived. Sanvi, Chetty’s 3-year-old daughter, wore a
pink tutu with matching hair ribbons and tights. She declined—
vigorously—the white sweater offered to ward off the evening
chill. Chetty and I had spent hours discussing his research, but
when the nanny dropped Sanvi off, it marked the end of the day.
Chetty gathered his things and whisked her up in his arms.

25. “Hold me properly, Appa,” Sanvi admonished. Outside, we got
into Chetty’s aging silver Acura and headed to an Indonesian
restaurant for takeout. Sanvi bubbled with enthusiasm. “I want
to be a fairy princess,” she announced from the back seat. “Can
I be a fairy princess?” Chetty glanced in the rearview mirror
and assured Sanvi that when she grows up, she can be whatever
she wants.
After stopping for the food, we pulled up to a light-brown ranch
house, with beautiful plantings out front. Inside, the house was
clearly Sanvi’s. Taking a seat in the open kitchen, I was
surrounded by a tapestry of exuberant finger paintings taped to
the walls, interspersed with pages neatly torn from coloring
books (penguins, parrots, bunnies, each splashed with color). A
pair of persimmon trees were fruiting out back.
Chetty told me that his interest in poverty dates back to the
horrifying want he observed on the streets of New Delhi. But
only when he built the first version of his atlas did he see what
he should do about it. “I realized,” he said, “we could have the
biggest impact on poverty by focusing on children.”
Chetty thinks about revolution like an economist does: as a
compounding accumulation of marginal changes. Bump the
interest rate on your savings account by one notch, and 30 years
later, your balance is much improved. Move a family to a better
zip code, or foster the right conditions in that family’s current
neighborhood, and their children will do better; do that a
thousand times, or ten thousand, and the American dream can be
more possible, for more people, than it is today.
In the 1930s, the poet Langston Hughes published what remains
one of the most honest descriptions of that dream:
A dream so strong, so brave, so true
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned

26. That’s made America the land it has become
The poem, though, is laced with a counterpoint of protest:
“America was never America to me”—not to the “man who
never got ahead”; “the poorest worker bartered through the
years”; or “the Negro, servant to you all.” Still, for all its
outrage, the poem ends with a paradoxical yearning: “O, let
America be America again,” Hughes wrote. “The land that never
has been yet.”
Hearing stories of the American dream as a boy in New Delhi,
Chetty adopted the faith. When he became a scientist, he
discerned the truth. What remains is contradiction: We must
believe in the dream and we must accept that it is false—then,
perhaps, we will be capable of building a land where it will yet
be true.
This article appears in the August 2019 print edition with the
headline “Raj Chetty’s American Dream.”
* This article originally stated that Minneapolis was the home
of the Mayo Clinic.
Gareth Cook is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a
contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine.
Vanity Fair
“Rethinking the American Dream”
By David Kamp
March 5, 2009
Along with millions of jobs and 401(k)s, the concept of a shared
national ideal is said to be dying. But is the American Dream

27. really endangered, or has it simply been misplaced? Exploring
the way our aspirations have changed—the rugged
individualism of the Wild West, the social compact of F.D.R.,
the sitcom fantasy of 50s suburbia—the author shows how the
American Dream came to mean fame and fortune, instead of the
promise that shaped a nation.
The year was 1930, a down one like this one. But for Moss Hart,
it was the time for his particularly American moment of
triumph. He had grown up poor in the outer boroughs of New
York City—“the grim smell of actual want always at the end of
my nose,” he said—and he’d vowed that if he ever made it big
he would never again ride the rattling trains of the city’s dingy
subway system. Now he was 25, and his first play, Once in a
Lifetime, had just opened to raves on Broadway. And so, with
three newspapers under his arm and a wee-hours celebration of
a successful opening night behind him, he hailed a cab and took
a long, leisurely sunrise ride back to the apartment in Brooklyn
where he still lived with his parents and brother.
Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge into one of the several drab
tenement neighborhoods that preceded his own, Hart later
recalled, “I stared through the taxi window at a pinch-faced 10-
year-old hurrying down the steps on some morning errand
before school, and I thought of myself hurrying down the street
on so many gray mornings out of a doorway and a house much
the same as this one.… It was possible in this wonderful city for
that nameless little boy—for any of its millions—to have a
decent chance to scale the walls and achieve what they wished.
Wealth, rank, or an imposing name counted for nothing. The
only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream.”
As the boy ducked into a tailor shop, Hart recognized that this
narrative was not exclusive to his “wonderful city”—it was one
that could happen anywhere in, and only in, America. “A surge
of shamefaced patriotism overwhelmed me,” Hart wrote in his
memoir, Act One. “I might have been watching a victory parade
on a flag-draped Fifth Avenue instead of the mean streets of a

28. city slum. A feeling of patriotism, however, is not always
limited to the feverish emotions called forth by war. It can
sometimes be felt as profoundly and perhaps more truly at a
moment such as this.”
Hart, like so many before and after him, was overcome by the
power of the American Dream. As a people, we Americans are
unique in having such a thing, a more or less Official National
Dream. (There is no correspondingly stirring Canadian Dream
or Slovakian Dream.) It is part of our charter—as articulated in
the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, in the
famous bit about “certain unalienable Rights” that include
“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—and it is what
makes our country and our way of life attractive and magnetic
to people in other lands.
But now fast-forward to the year 2009, the final Friday of
January. The new president is surveying the dire economy he
has been charged with righting—600,000 jobs lost in January
alone, a gross domestic product that shrank 3.8 percent in the
final quarter of 2008, the worst contraction in almost 30 years.
Assessing these numbers, Barack Obama, a man who normally
exudes hopefulness for a living, pronounces them a “continuing
disaster for America’s working families,” a disaster that
amounts to no less, he says, than “the American Dream in
reverse.”
In reverse. Imagine this in terms of Hart’s life: out of the
taxicab, back on the subway, back to the tenements, back to
cramped cohabitation with Mom and Dad, back to gray
mornings and the grim smell of actual want.
You probably don’t even have to imagine, for chances are that
of late you have experienced some degree of reversal yourself,
or at the very least have had friends or loved ones get laid off,
lose their homes, or just find themselves forced to give up
certain perks and amenities (restaurant meals, cable TV, salon
haircuts) that were taken for granted as recently as a year ago.
These are tough times for the American Dream. As the safe
routines of our lives have come undone, so has our

29. characteristic optimism—not only our belief that the future is
full of limitless possibility, but our faith that things will
eventually return to normal, whatever “normal” was before the
recession hit. There is even worry that the dream may be over—
that we currently living Americans are the unfortunate ones who
shall bear witness to that deflating moment in history when the
promise of this country began to wither. This is the “sapping of
confidence” that President Obama alluded to in his inaugural
address, the “nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable,
and that the next generation must lower its sights.”
But let’s face it: If Moss Hart, like so many others, was able to
rally from the depths of the Great Depression, then surely the
viability of the American Dream isn’t in question. What needs
to change is our expectation of what the dream promises—and
our understanding of what that vague and promiscuously used
term, “the American Dream,” is really supposed to mean.
In recent years, the term has often been interpreted to mean
“making it big” or “striking it rich.” (As the cult of Brian De
Palma’s Scarface has grown, so, disturbingly, has the number of
people with a literal, celebratory read on its tagline: “He loved
the American Dream. With a vengeance.”) Even when the
phrase isn’t being used to describe the accumulation of great
wealth, it’s frequently deployed to denote extreme success of
some kind or other. Last year, I heard commentators say that
Barack Obama achieved the American Dream by getting elected
president, and that Philadelphia Phillies manager Charlie
Manuel achieved the American Dream by leading his team to its
first World Series title since 1980.
·
Yet there was never any promise or intimation of extreme
success in the book that popularized the term, The Epic of
America, by James Truslow Adams, published by Little, Brown
and Company in 1931. (Yes, “the American Dream” is a
surprisingly recent coinage; you’d think that these words would
appear in the writings of Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin

30. Franklin, but they don’t.) For a book that has made such a
lasting contribution to our vocabulary, The Epic of America is
an offbeat piece of work—a sweeping, essayistic, highly
subjective survey of this country’s development from
Columbus’s landfall onward, written by a respected but solemn
historian whose prim prose style was mocked as “spinach” by
the waggish theater critic Alexander Woollcott.
But it’s a smart, thoughtful treatise. Adams’s goal wasn’t so
much to put together a proper history of the U.S. as to
determine, by tracing his country’s path to prominence, what
makes this land so unlike other nations, so
uniquely American. (That he undertook such an enterprise when
he did, in the same grim climate in which Hart wrote Once in a
Lifetime, reinforces how indomitably strong Americans’ faith in
their country remained during the Depression.) What Adams
came up with was a construct he called “that American dream of
a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every
rank.”
From the get-go, Adams emphasized the egalitarian nature of
this dream. It started to take shape, he said, with the Puritans
who fled religious persecution in England and settled New
England in the 17th century. “[Their] migration was not like so
many earlier ones in history, led by warrior lords with followers
dependent on them,” he wrote, “but was one in which the
common man as well as the leader was hoping for greater
freedom and happiness for himself and his children.”
The Declaration of Independence took this concept even further,
for it compelled the well-to-do upper classes to put the common
man on an equal footing with them where human rights and self-
governance were concerned—a nose-holding concession that
Adams captured with exquisite comic passiveness in the
sentence, “It had been found necessary to base the
[Declaration’s] argument at last squarely on the rights of man.”
Whereas the colonist upper classes were asserting their
independence from the British Empire, “the lower classes were
thinking not only of that,” Adams wrote, “but of their relations

31. to their colonial legislatures and governing class.”
America was truly a new world, a place where one could live
one’s life and pursue one’s goals unburdened by older societies’
prescribed ideas of class, caste, and social hierarchy. Adams
was unreserved in his wonderment over this fact. Breaking from
his formal tone, he shifted into first-person mode in *The Epic
of America’*s epilogue, noting a French guest’s remark that his
most striking impression of the United States was “the way that
everyone of every sort looks you right in the eye, without a
thought of inequality.” Adams also told a story of “a foreigner”
he used to employ as an assistant, and how he and this foreigner
fell into a habit of chitchatting for a bit after their day’s work
was done. “Such a relationship was the great difference between
America and his homeland,” Adams wrote. “There, he said, ‘I
would do my work and might get a pleasant word, but I could
never sit and talk like this. There is a difference there between
social grades which cannot be got over. I would not talk to you
there as man to man, but as my employer.’”
Anecdotal as these examples are, they get to the crux of the
American Dream as Adams saw it: that life in the United States
offered personal liberties and opportunities to a degree
unmatched by any other country in history—a circumstance that
remains true today, some ill-considered clampdowns in the
name of Homeland Security notwithstanding. This invigorating
sense of possibility, though it is too often taken for granted, is
the great gift of Americanness. Even Adams underestimated it.
Not above the prejudices of his time, he certainly never saw
Barack Obama’s presidency coming. While he correctly
anticipated the eventual assimilation of the millions of Eastern
and Southern European immigrants who arrived in the early
20th century to work in America’s factories, mines, and
sweatshops, he entertained no such hopes for black people. Or,
as he rather injudiciously put it, “After a generation or two, [the
white-ethnic laborers] can be absorbed, whereas the negro
cannot.”
It’s also worth noting that Adams did not deny that there is a

32. material component to the American Dream. The Epic of
America offers several variations on Adams’s definition of the
dream (e.g., “the American dream that life should be made
richer and fuller for everyone and opportunity remain open to
all”), but the word “richer” appears in all of them, and he
wasn’t just talking about richness of experience. Yet Adams was
careful not to overstate what the dream promises. In one of his
final iterations of the “American Dream” trope, he described it
as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and
richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each
according to his ability or achievement.”
That last part—“according to his ability or achievement”—is the
tempering phrase, a shrewd bit of expectations management. A
“better and richer life” is promised, but for most people this
won’t be a rich person’s life. “Opportunity for each” is
promised, but within the bounds of each person’s ability; the
reality is, some people will realize the American Dream more
stupendously and significantly than others. (For example, while
President Obama is correct in saying, “Only in America is my
story possible,” this does not make it true that anyone in
America can be the next Obama.) Nevertheless, the American
Dream is within reach for all those who aspire to it and are
willing to put in the hours; Adams was articulating it as an
attainable outcome, not as a pipe dream.
As the phrase “the American Dream” insinuated its way into the
lexicon, its meaning continuously morphed and shifted,
reflecting the hopes and wants of the day. Adams, in The Epic
of America, noted that one such major shift had already
occurred in the republic’s history, before he’d given the dream
its name. In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared that there
was no longer such a thing as the American frontier. This was
not an official pronouncement but an observation in the
bureau’s report that “the unsettled area has been so broken into
by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to
be a frontier line.”
The tapering off of the frontier era put an end to the immature,

33. individualistic, Wild West version of the American Dream, the
one that had animated homesteaders, prospectors, wildcatters,
and railroad men. “For a century and more,” Adams wrote, “our
successive ‘Wests’ had dominated the thoughts of the poor, the
restless, the discontented, the ambitious, as they had those of
business expansionists and statesmen.”
But by the time Woodrow Wilson became president, in 1913—
after the first national election in which every voter in the
continental U.S. cast his ballot as a citizen of an established
state—that vision had become passé. In fact, to hear the new
president speak, the frontiersman’s version of the American
Dream was borderline malevolent. Speaking in his inaugural
address as if he had just attended a screening of There Will Be
Blood, Wilson declared, “We have squandered a great part of
what we might have used, and have not stopped to conserve the
exceeding bounty of nature, without which our genius for
enterprise would have been worthless and impotent.”
Referencing both the end of the frontier and the rapid
industrialization that arose in its aftermath, Wilson said, “There
has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our
haste to succeed and be great.… We have come now to the sober
second thought. The scales of heedlessness have fallen from our
eyes. We have made up our minds to square every process of
our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up
at the beginning.”
The American Dream was maturing into a shared dream, a
societal compact that reached its apotheosis when Franklin
Delano Roosevelt was sworn into office in 1933 and began
implementing the New Deal. A “better and richer and fuller”
life was no longer just what America promised its hardworking
citizens individually; it was an ideal toward which these
citizens were duty-bound to strive together. The Social Security
Act of 1935 put this theory into practice. It mandated that
workers and their employers contribute, via payroll taxes, to
federally administered trust funds that paid out benefits to
retirees—thereby introducing the idea of a “safe old age” with

34. built-in protection from penury.
This was, arguably, the first time that a specific material
component was ascribed to the American Dream, in the form of
a guarantee that you could retire at the age of 65 and rest
assured that your fellow citizens had your back. On January 31,
1940, a hardy Vermonter named Ida May Fuller, a former legal
secretary, became the very first retiree to receive a monthly
Social Security benefit check, which totaled $22.54. As if to
prove both the best hopes of Social Security’s proponents and
the worst fears of its detractors, Fuller enjoyed a long
retirement, collecting benefits all the way to her death in 1975,
when she was 100 years old.
Still, the American Dream, in F.D.R.’s day, remained largely a
set of deeply held ideals rather than a checklist of goals or
entitlements. When Henry Luce published his famous essay
“The American Century” in Life magazine in February 1941, he
urged that the U.S. should no longer remain on the sidelines of
World War II but use its might to promote this country’s “love
of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition
of self-reliance and independence, and also of cooperation.”
Luce was essentially proposing that the American Dream—more
or less as Adams had articulated it—serve as a global
advertisement for our way of life, one to which non-
democracies should be converted, whether by force or gentle
coercion. (He was a missionary’s son.)
More soberly and less bombastically, Roosevelt, in his 1941
State of the Union address, prepared America for war by
articulating the “four essential human freedoms” that the U.S.
would be fighting for: “freedom of speech and expression”;
“freedom of every person to worship God in his own way”;
“freedom from want”; and “freedom from fear.” Like Luce,
Roosevelt was upholding the American way as a model for other
nations to follow—he suffixed each of these freedoms with the
phrase “everywhere in the world”—but he presented the four
freedoms not as the lofty principles of a benevolent super race
but as the homespun, bedrock values of a good, hardworking,

35. unextravagant people.
No one grasped this better than Norman Rockwell, who, stirred
to action by Roosevelt’s speech, set to work on his famous
“Four Freedoms” paintings: the one with the rough-hewn
workman speaking his piece at a town meeting (Freedom of
Speech); the one with the old lady praying in the pew (Freedom
of Worship); the one with the Thanksgiving dinner (Freedom
from Want); and the one with the young parents looking in on
their sleeping children (Freedom from Fear). These paintings,
first reproduced in The Saturday Evening Post in 1943, proved
enormously popular, so much so that the original works were
commandeered for a national tour that raised $133 million in
U.S. war bonds, while the Office of War Information printed up
four million poster copies for distribution.
Whatever your opinion of Rockwell (and I’m a fan), the
resonance of the “Four Freedoms” paintings with wartime
Americans offers tremendous insight into how U.S. citizens
viewed their idealized selves. Freedom from Want, the most
popular of all, is especially telling, for the scene it depicts is
joyous but defiantly unostentatious. There is a happily gathered
family, there are plain white curtains, there is a large turkey,
there are some celery stalks in a dish, and there is a bowl of
fruit, but there is not a hint of overabundance, overindulgence,
elaborate table settings, ambitious seasonal centerpieces, or any
other conventions of modern-day shelter-mag porn.
It was freedom from want, not freedom to want—a world away
from the idea that the patriotic thing to do in tough times is go
shopping. Though the germ of that idea would form shortly, not
long after the war ended.
William J. Levitt was a Seabee in the Pacific theater during the
war, a member of one of the Construction Battalions (CBs) of
the U.S. Navy. One of his jobs was to build airfields at as fast a
clip as possible, on the cheap. Levitt had already worked in his
father’s construction business back home, and he held an option
on a thousand acres of potato fields in Hempstead, New York,
out on Long Island. Coming back from the war with newly

36. acquired speed-building skills and a vision of all those
returning G.I.’s needing homes, he set to work on turning those
potato fields into the first Levittown.
Levitt had the forces of history and demographics on his side.
The G.I. Bill, enacted in 1944, at the tail end of the New Deal,
offered returning veterans low-interest loans with no money
down to purchase a house—an ideal scenario, coupled with a
severe housing shortage and a boom in young families, for the
rapid-fire development of suburbia.
The first Levitt houses, built in 1947, had two bedrooms, one
bathroom, a living room, a kitchen, and an unfinished loft attic
that could theoretically be converted into another bedroom. The
houses had no basements or garages, but they sat on lots of 60
by 100 feet, and—McMansionistas, take note—took up only 12
percent of their lot’s footprint. They cost about $8,000.
“Levittown” is today a byword for creepy suburban conformity,
but Bill Levitt, with his Henry Ford–like acumen for mass
production, played a crucial role in making home ownership a
new tenet of the American Dream, especially as he expanded his
operations to other states and inspired imitators. From 1900 to
1940, the percentage of families who lived in homes that they
themselves owned held steady at around 45 percent. But by
1950 this figure had shot up to 55 percent, and by 1960 it was at
62 percent. Likewise, the homebuilding business, severely
depressed during the war, revived abruptly at war’s end, going
from 114,000 new single-family houses started in 1944 to
937,000 in 1946—and to 1.7 million in 1950.
Levitt initially sold his houses only to vets, but this policy
didn’t hold for long; demand for a new home of one’s own
wasn’t remotely limited to ex-G.I.’s, as the Hollywood
filmmaker Frank Capra was astute enough to note in It’s a
Wonderful Life. In 1946, a full year before the first Levittown
was populated, Capra’s creation George Bailey (played by
Jimmy Stewart) cut the ribbon on his own eponymous suburban-
tract development, Bailey Park, and his first customer wasn’t a
war veteran but a hardworking Italian immigrant, the

37. tremulously grateful saloonkeeper Mr. Martini. (An
overachiever, Capra was both a war veteran and a hardworking
Italian immigrant.)
Buttressed by postwar optimism and prosperity, the American
Dream was undergoing another recalibration. Now it really did
translate into specific goals rather than Adams’s more broadly
defined aspirations. Home ownership was the fundamental goal,
but, depending on who was doing the dreaming, the package
might also include car ownership, television ownership (which
multiplied from 6 million to 60 million sets in the U.S. between
1950 and 1960), and the intent to send one’s kids to college.
The G.I. Bill was as crucial on that last count as it was to the
housing boom. In providing tuition money for returning vets, it
not only stocked the universities with new students—in 1947,
roughly half of the nation’s college enrollees were ex-G.I.’s—
but put the very idea of college within reach of a generation that
had previously considered higher education the exclusive
province of the rich and the extraordinarily gifted. Between
1940 and 1965, the number of U.S. adults who had completed at
least four years of college more than doubled.
Nothing reinforced the seductive pull of the new, suburbanized
American Dream more than the burgeoning medium of
television, especially as its production nexus shifted from New
York, where the grubby, schlubby shows The
Honeymooners and The Phil Silvers Show were shot, to
Southern California, where the sprightly, twinkly shows The
Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave
It to Beaver were made. While the former shows are actually
more enduringly watchable and funny, the latter were the
foremost “family” sitcoms of the 1950s—and, as such, the
aspirational touchstones of real American families.
The Nelsons (Ozzie and Harriet), the Andersons (Father Knows
Best), and the Cleavers (Leave It to Beaver) lived in airy houses
even nicer than those that Bill Levitt built. In fact, the Nelson
home in Ozzie and Harriet was a faithful replica of the two-
story Colonial in Hollywood where Ozzie, Harriet, David, and

38. Ricky Nelson really lived when they weren’t filming their show.
The Nelsons also offered, in David and especially the
swoonsome, guitar-strumming Ricky, two attractive exemplars
of that newly ascendant and clout-wielding American
demographic, the teenager. “The postwar spread of American
values would be spearheaded by the idea of the teenager,”
writes Jon Savage somewhat ominously in Teenage, his history
of youth culture. “This new type was pleasure-seeking, product-
hungry, embodying the new global society where social
inclusion was to be granted through purchasing power.”
Still, the American Dream was far from degenerating into the
consumerist nightmare it would later become (or, more
precisely, become mistaken for). What’s striking about
the Ozzie and Harriet–style 50s dream is its relative modesty of
scale. Yes, the TV and advertising portrayals of family life were
antiseptic and too-too-perfect, but the dream homes, real and
fictional, seem downright dowdy to modern eyes, with none of
the “great room” pretensions and tricked-out kitchen islands
that were to come.
Nevertheless, some social critics, such as the economist John
Kenneth Galbraith, were already fretful. In his 1958 book The
Affluent Society, a best-seller, Galbraith posited that America
had reached an almost unsurpassable and unsustainable degree
of mass affluence because the average family owned a home,
one car, and one TV. In pursuing these goals, Galbraith said,
Americans had lost a sense of their priorities, focusing on
consumerism at the expense of public-sector needs like parks,
schools, and infrastructure maintenance. At the same time, they
had lost their parents’ Depression-era sense of thrift, blithely
taking out personal loans or enrolling in installment plans to
buy their cars and refrigerators.
While these concerns would prove prescient, Galbraith severely
underestimated the potential for average U.S. household income
and spending power to grow further. The very same year
that The Affluent Society came out, Bank of America
introduced the BankAmericard, the forerunner to Visa, today the

39. most widely used credit card in the world.
What unfolded over the next generation was the greatest
standard-of-living upgrade that this country had ever
experienced: an economic sea change powered by the middle
class’s newly sophisticated engagement in personal finance via
credit cards, mutual funds, and discount brokerage houses—and
its willingness to take on debt.
Consumer credit, which had already rocketed upward from $2.6
billion to $45 billion in the postwar period (1945 to 1960), shot
up to $105 billion by 1970. “It was as if the entire middle class
was betting that tomorrow would be better than today,” as the
financial writer Joe Nocera put it in his 1994 book, A Piece of
the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money
Class. “Thus did Americans begin to spend money they didn’t
yet have; thus did the unaffordable become affordable. And
thus, it must be said, did the economy grow.”
Before it spiraled out of control, the “money revolution,” to use
Nocera’s term for this great middle-class financial engagement,
really did serve the American Dream. It helped make life “better
and richer and fuller” for a broad swath of the populace in ways
that our Depression-era forebears could only have imagined.
To be glib about it, the Brady family’s way of life was even
sweeter than the Nelson family’s. The Brady Bunch, which
debuted in 1969, in *The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet’*s
old Friday-night-at-eight slot on ABC, occupied the same space
in the American psyche of the 70s as Ozzie and Harriet had in
the 50s: as the middle class’s American Dream wish-fulfillment
fantasy, again in a generically idyllic Southern California
setting. But now there were two cars in the driveway. Now there
were annual vacations at the Grand Canyon and an improbably
caper-filled trip to Hawaii. (The average number of airplane
trips per American household, less than one per year in 1954,
was almost three per year in 1970.) And the house itself was
snazzier—that open-plan living area just inside the Brady
home’s entryway, with the “floating” staircase leading up to the
bedrooms, was a major step forward in fake-nuclear-family

40. living.
By 1970, for the first time, more than half of all U.S. families
held at least one credit card. But usage was still relatively
conservative: only 22 percent of cardholders carried a balance
from one month’s bill to the next. Even in the so-called go-go
80s, this figure hovered in the 30s, compared to 56 percent
today. But it was in the 80s that the American Dream began to
take on hyperbolic connotations, to be conflated with extreme
success: wealth, basically. The representative TV families,
whether benignly genteel (the Huxtables on The Cosby Show)
or soap-opera bonkers (the Carringtons on Dynasty), were
undeniably rich. “Who says you can’t have it all?” went the
jingle in a ubiquitous beer commercial from the era, which only
got more alarming as it went on to ask, “Who says you can’t
have the world without losing your soul?”
The deregulatory atmosphere of the Reagan years—the
loosening of strictures on banks and energy companies, the
reining in of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, the
removal of vast tracts of land from the Department of the
Interior’s protected list—was, in a sense, a calculated
regression to the immature, individualistic American Dream of
yore; not for nothing did Ronald Reagan (and, later, far less
effectively, George W. Bush) go out of his way to cultivate a
frontiersman’s image, riding horses, chopping wood, and
reveling in the act of clearing brush.
To some degree, this outlook succeeded in rallying middle-class
Americans to seize control of their individual fates as never
before—to “Go for it!,” as people in yellow ties and red braces
were fond of saying at the time. In one of Garry Trudeau’s
finest moments from the 80s, a Doonesbury character was
shown watching a political campaign ad in which a woman
concluded her pro-Reagan testimonial with the tagline “Ronald
Reagan … because I’m worth it.”
But this latest recalibration saw the American Dream get
decoupled from any concept of the common good (the
movement to privatize Social Security began to take on

41. momentum) and, more portentously, from the concepts of
working hard and managing one’s expectations. You only had to
walk as far as your mailbox to discover that you’d been “pre-
approved” for six new credit cards, and that the credit limits on
your existing cards had been raised without your even asking.
Never before had money been freer, which is to say, never
before had taking on debt become so guiltless and seemingly
consequence-free—at both the personal and institutional levels.
President Reagan added $1 trillion to the national debt, and in
1986, the United States, formerly the world’s biggest creditor
nation, became the world’s biggest debtor nation. Perhaps debt
was the new frontier.
A curious phenomenon took hold in the 1990s and 2000s. Even
as the easy credit continued, and even as a sustained bull market
cheered investors and papered over the coming mortgage and
credit crises that we now face, Americans were losing faith in
the American Dream—or whatever it was they believed the
American Dream to be. A CNN poll taken in 2006 found that
more than half of those surveyed, 54 percent, considered the
American Dream unachievable—and CNN noted that the
numbers were nearly the same in a 2003 poll it had conducted.
Before that, in 1995, a Business Week/Harris poll found that
two-thirds of those surveyed believed the American Dream had
become harder to achieve in the past 10 years, and three-fourths
believed that achieving the dream would be harder still in the
upcoming 10 years.
To the writer Gregg Easterbrook, who at the beginning of this
decade was a visiting fellow in economics at the Brookings
Institution, this was all rather puzzling, because, by the
definition of any prior American generation, the American
Dream had been more fully realized by more people than ever
before. While acknowledging that an obscene amount of
America’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of a small
group of ultra-rich, Easterbrook noted that “the bulk of the
gains in living standards—the gains that really matter—have
occurred below the plateau of wealth.”

42. By nearly every measurable indicator, Easterbrook pointed out
in 2003, life for the average American had gotten better than it
used to be. Per capita income, adjusted for inflation, had more
than doubled since 1960. Almost 70 percent of Americans
owned the places they lived in, versus under 20 percent a
century earlier. Furthermore, U.S. citizens averaged 12.3 years
of education, tops in the world and a length of time in school
once reserved solely for the upper class.
Yet when Easterbrook published these figures in a book, the
book was called The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better
While People Feel Worse. He was paying attention not only to
the polls in which people complained that the American Dream
was out of reach, but to academic studies by political scientists
and mental-health experts that detected a marked uptick since
the midcentury in the number of Americans who considered
themselves unhappy.
The American Dream was now almost by definition
unattainable, a moving target that eluded people’s grasp;
nothing was ever enough. It compelled Americans to set
unmeetable goals for themselves and then consider themselves
failures when these goals, inevitably, went unmet. In examining
why people were thinking this way, Easterbrook raised an
important point. “For at least a century,” he wrote, “Western
life has been dominated by a revolution of rising expectations:
Each generation expected more than its antecedent. Now most
Americans and Europeans already have what they need, in
addition to considerable piles of stuff they don’t need.”
This might explain the existential ennui of the well-off,
attractive, solipsistic kids on Laguna Beach (2004–6) and The
Hills (2006–9), the MTV reality soaps that represent the
curdling of the whole Southern California wish-fulfillment
genre on television. Here were affluent beach-community teens
enriching themselves further not even by acting or working in
any real sense, but by allowing themselves to be filmed as they
sat by campfires maundering on about, like, how much their
lives suck.

43. In the same locale that begat these programs, Orange County,
there emerged a Bill Levitt of McMansions, an Iranian-born
entrepreneur named Hadi Makarechian whose company, Capital
Pacific Holdings, specializes in building tract-housing
developments for multi-millionaires, places with names like
Saratoga Cove and Ritz Pointe. In a 2001 profile of
Makarechian in The New Yorker, David Brooks mentioned that
the builder had run into zoning restrictions on his latest
development, called Oceanfront, that prevented the “entry
statement”—the walls that mark the entrance to the
development—from being any higher than four feet. Noted
Brooks drolly, “The people who are buying homes in
Oceanfront are miffed about the small entry statement.” Nothing
was ever enough.
An extreme example, perhaps, but not misrepresentative of the
national mind-set. It says a lot about our buying habits and
constant need for new, better stuff that Congress and the
Federal Communications Commission were utterly comfortable
with setting a hard 2009 date for the switchover from analog to
digital television broadcasting—pretty much assuming that
every American household owns or will soon own a flat-panel
digital TV—even though such TVs have been widely available
for only five years. (As recently as January 2006, just 20
percent of U.S. households owned a digital television, and the
average price point for such a television was still above a
thousand dollars.)
In hewing to the misbegotten notion that our standard of living
must trend inexorably upward, we entered in the late 90s and
early 00s into what might be called the Juiceball Era of the
American Dream—a time of steroidally outsize purchasing and
artificially inflated numbers. As Easterbrook saw it, it was no
longer enough for people to keep up with the Joneses; no, now
they had to “call and raise the Joneses.”
“Bloated houses,” he wrote, “arise from a desire to call-and-
raise-the-Joneses—surely not from a belief that a seven-
thousand-square-foot house that comes right up against the

44. property setback line would be an ideal place in which to
dwell.” More ominously and to the point: “To call-and-raise-
the-Joneses, Americans increasingly take on debt.”
This personal debt, coupled with mounting institutional debt, is
what has got us in the hole we’re in now. While it remains a
laudable proposition for a young couple to secure a low-interest
loan for the purchase of their first home, the more recent
practice of running up huge credit-card bills to pay for, well,
whatever, has come back to haunt us. The amount of
outstanding consumer debt in the U.S. has gone up every year
since 1958, and up an astonishing 22 percent since 2000 alone.
The financial historian and V.F. contributor Niall Ferguson
reckons that the over-leveraging of America has become
especially acute in the last 10 years, with the U.S.’s debt
burden, as a proportion of the gross domestic product, “in the
region of 355 percent,” he says. “So, debt is three and a half
times the output of the economy. That’s some kind of historic
maximum.”
James Truslow Adams’s words remind us that we’re still
fortunate to live in a country that offers us such latitude in
choosing how we go about our lives and work—even in this
crapola economy. Still, we need to challenge some of the
middle-class orthodoxies that have brought us to this point—not
least the notion, widely promulgated throughout popular
culture, that the middle class itself is a soul-suffocating dead
end.
The middle class is a good place to be, and, optimally, where
most Americans will spend their lives if they work hard and
don’t over-extend themselves financially. On American
Idol, Simon Cowell has done a great many youngsters a great
service by telling them that they’re not going to Hollywood and
that they should find some other line of work. The American
Dream is not fundamentally about stardom or extreme success;
in recalibrating our expectations of it, we need to appreciate
that it is not an all-or-nothing deal—that it is not, as in hip-hop
narratives and in Donald Trump’s brain, a stark choice between

45. the penthouse and the streets.
And what about the outmoded proposition that each successive
generation in the United States must live better than the one
that preceded it? While this idea is still crucial to families
struggling in poverty and to immigrants who’ve arrived here in
search of a better life than that they left behind, it’s no longer
applicable to an American middle class that lives more
comfortably than any version that came before it. (Was this not
one of the cautionary messages of the most thoughtful movie of
2008, wall-e?) I’m no champion of downward mobility, but the
time has come to consider the idea of simple continuity: the
perpetuation of a contented, sustainable middle-class way of
life, where the standard of living remains happily constant from
one generation to the next.
This is not a matter of any generation’s having to “lower its
sights,” to use President Obama’s words, nor is it a denial that
some children of lower- and middle-class parents will, through
talent and/or good fortune, strike it rich and bound precipitously
into the upper class. Nor is it a moony, nostalgic wish for a
return to the scrappy 30s or the suburban 50s, because any
sentient person recognizes that there’s plenty about the good old
days that wasn’t so good: the original Social Security program
pointedly excluded farmworkers and domestics (i.e., poor rural
laborers and minority women), and the original Levittown
didn’t allow black people in.
But those eras do offer lessons in scale and self-control. The
American Dream should require hard work, but it should not
require 80-hour workweeks and parents who never see their kids
from across the dinner table. The American Dream should entail
a first-rate education for every child, but not an education that
leaves no extra time for the actual enjoyment of childhood. The
American Dream should accommodate the goal of home
ownership, but without imposing a lifelong burden of
unmeetable debt. Above all, the American Dream should be
embraced as the unique sense of possibility that this country
gives its citizens—the decent chance, as Moss Hart would say,

46. to scale the walls and achieve what you wish.
Freakonomics
“Is the American Dream Really Dead? (Ep. 273)
January 18, 2017 @ 11:00pm
by Stephen J. Dubner
Produced by Greg Rosalsky
Let’s start today with a pop quiz. Here we go: in 1970, what
percentage of 30-year-olds in America earned more money than
their parents had earned at that age? Adjusted for inflation, of
course. That’s question No. 1. And question No. 2: what
percentage of American 30-year-olds today earn more than their
parents earned at age 30? I’ll give you a second to think it over.
All right, you ready for the answer? The percentage of
American 30-year-olds in 1970 who were earning more than
their parents had earned at 30? Ninety-two percent. Isn’t that
amazing? That, in a nutshell, is what we call the American
Dream. And what’s the percentage now? It’s somewhere around
50 percent. Which has led some people to say this:
Donald TRUMP: Sadly, the American Dream is dead!
Donald Trump’s view of the American Dream – and his promise
to revive it – had a lot to do with his getting elected president.
According to Gallup polls, before the election more than 50
percent of Americans saw our economic conditions worsening.
And, in case you’re wondering, it’s not just cranky old people.
A poll from the Harvard Institute of Politics found that nearly
fifty percent of millennials think the American Dream is
“dead.” We went out on the streets of New York ourselves to
ask people if they thought the American dream was real, and
achievable.

47. VOICES ON THE STREET:
MALE 1: Absolutely it’s real. Especially standing here in
Battery Park you look at different people from all across nations
that come to America to realize the American dream.
FEMALE 1: I think that if you really work hard then you can do
whatever you want in America. It might be a little difficult at
first but you can still do it.
MALE 2: I don’t think the American dream is achievable. I
think it’s a motivator, to try to achieve it.
FEMALE 2: The American Dream is something of a mythology
for a way in which to advance and have a good life under what
is essentially not just a capitalist system but a country founded
on exploitation.
FEMALE 3 : You put in some work, you put in some sweat, and
you can definitely make the American Dream happen.
MALE 3: Well, there’s a lot of cynicism now over the American
dream. I am a product of it. My family, our families are
refugees, came to this country 30 years ago. Had nothing. Was
able to send all their kids to college, was able to have a house,
was able to give a better future for myself and their children
than they ever would have had back in Vietnam.
A lot of the conversations we have these days about the
American Dream are in political terms, or theoretical terms.
Today on Freakonomics Radio: the actual, unvarnished
economics of the American Dream. Which we will define, for
the sake of today’s conversation, as this:
Raj CHETTY: If you’re born into a low-income family, do you
really have a shot at rising up no matter what your background
is?
And we’ll discuss whether the American Dream is really dead –
or maybe if it’s just moved a bit … north.
CHETTY: You’re twice as likely to realize the American Dream
if you’re growing up in Canada rather than the U.S.

48. * * *
James Truslow Adams, born in 1878 to a wealthy New York
family, became a financier and, later, an author. He won a
Pulitzer Prize for a history of New England; and later he wrote
a book called The Epic of America. Even though it was written
during the Great Depression, Adams took a fundamentally
bullish view of the United States.
His book was hugely popular, and as best as we can tell, it
introduced the phrase “The American Dream.” Adams defined
this as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and
richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each
according to ability or achievement.” The phrase caught on,
and not just a little bit. Especially among our presidents:
Barack OBAMA: The bedrock of our economic success is the
American Dream.
Richard NIXON: The American Dream does not come to those
who fall asleep.
George W. BUSH: So every citizen has access to the American
Dream
Ronald REAGAN:They have lived the American Dream
Bill CLINTON: The American Dream will succeed or fail in the
21st Century.
Donald TRUMP: Sadly, the American Dream is dead!
Raj CHETTY: The reason my parents came to this country was
in search of the American Dream.
That’s Raj Chetty.
CHETTY: I was born in New Delhi, India, and came to the
United States when I was 9 years old, and grew up mostly in the
Midwest.
Chetty is now an economist at Stanford:
CHETTY: I study issues of inequality and opportunity and how
we can use economic policy to improve people’s outcomes.
Chetty was one of the scholars behind the research I cited
earlier, about the massive drop in the share of 30-year-old
Americans earning more than their parents did. In fact, he is

49. behind a lot of the most important research on income
inequality, mobility, and the fragile state of the American
Dream. His work is highly regarded by the people who give
awards – he has won a MacArthur “Genius” Award and the John
Bates Clark Medal. Politicians admire him as well.
Senator Jeff SESSIONS: Dr. Chetty, thank you for your
participation.
Senator Bernie SANDERS: Dr. Chetty, what do you think?
That was Senator Bernie Sanders and, before him, then-
Senator Jeff Sessions, when Chetty testified at a Senate hearing
on income mobility and inequality. Chetty is a favorite of
Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Hillary CLINTON: Some really interesting work being done by
Professor Raj Chetty and his colleagues.
As well as Republican Paul Ryan.
Paul RYAN: Economists — you know, if you talk to Raj Chetty
or others — they’ll tell you this is social capital.
Chetty is the policymakers’ policymaker. The economists’
economist. Which means he tries to be, above all, empirical.
Not ideological or political.
CHETTY: One of my missions is to try and inject more
evidence into these important policy debates because I think
we’re making huge investment decisions with very little
knowledge about exactly what is going to work.
Stephen J. DUBNER: Do you vote? Are you a political
participant?
CHETTY: I’m independent. And so I’ve thought hard about
this. I think it’s very difficult to keep yourself objective, which
is very important to me. I mean it’s important to me that I have
some findings that I think are more supportive of policies that
Democrats are pushing, and there are some findings that are
more supportive of policies that Republicans are pushing.

50. DUBNER: Some academics I know whose work gets cited for
political purposes have told me that the work is inevitably
cherry-picked or cream-skimmed to suit the politician’s
position.
CHETTY: I think while the big-picture focus might be chosen
based on political views, there are lots of details that matter
greatly, and I think science can be very useful there, in addition
to perhaps guiding which areas we focus on — affordable
housing versus tax cuts versus other things.
For all his influence, Chetty is only 37 years old.
CHETTY: I was actually the last person in my family to publish
a paper. My parents are both in academics, and I have two older
sisters who are in bioscience.
Chetty went to Harvard as an undergrad but he didn’t spend
spent much time undergradding: he got his Ph.D. at 23.
CHETTY: Basically I did a six-year Ph.D. and didn’t go to
college, in the sense that starting my sophomore year, I actually
didn’t take any undergraduate classes.
He taught at Berkeley, then Harvard, and in 2015, moved to
Stanford.
DUBNER: You are hardly the first economist from Harvard to
go to Stanford in the last few years. There’s been quite a little
exodus.
CHETTY: Recently, as the field of economics is shifting
towards big data and increasing use of modern statistical
techniques, like machine learning, to think about economic
questions, Stanford has tremendous strength in those areas and
other fields. And of course we all know that the birthplace of
much of modern computing is here in Silicon Valley at
Stanford.

51. DUBNER: Now, economists in particular, but social scientists
more broadly, have in the past few years especially, just been
being gobbled up by tech firms. Because they, too, have
discovered that big data is potentially exciting and a number of
academic economists, many of whom I’m sure you know well,
are moonlighting or sidelining with tech firms, Uber and
Facebook and on and on. What about you? Was that an appeal
for you to be out there and are you doing any consulting,
advising work on the side with these private firms? Or are you
strictly an academic economist?
CHETTY: Yeah, that is a very important trend. I myself am not
doing any work with those firms directly, but what I am
interested in is working with the data from firms like Facebook
and Twitter, for instance, to think about social and economic
policy questions. So, to give you a concrete example, I’m
starting a project with my colleague Matt Jackson here at
Stanford, and others at Facebook, where we’re exploring the
role of social networks in inequality, and trying to understand
essentially whether you can network yourself out of poverty.
Social scientists have been interested in that sort of question for
a very long time, but we just haven’t had the data to really
investigate that question precisely from an empirical point of
view. And the Facebook data, of course, are game-changing in
that respect.
A lot of Chetty’s research falls under the banner of something
called the Equality of Opportunity Project. That is a group of
economists – and other social scientists – who are trying to find
the most effective, and efficient, ways to address chronic
poverty. Which, Chetty argues, is really important. Because the
economy that for so many years facilitated the American Dream
for so many millions is no longer reliably doing so.
CHETTY: While modern technology and economic growth is
changing the world in tremendous ways — I mean, we can now
do things with our cell phones that we never would have

52. imagined 10 years ago — I think unless we think carefully
about social policy, doesn’t necessarily end up
benefiting everyone. There are many people for whom progress
over the last 30 years hasn’t really had a tremendous impact on
their lives in terms of better opportunities for their kids or
better health outcomes and so forth.
Chetty admits the American Dream worked out great for his
immigrant family.
CHETTY: And so partly with that personal motivation, partly
out of scientific interest, I wanted to think about whether the
American Dream truly is alive and well, and what the
determinants of the American Dream are.
Okay, so how do you do that? How do you measure the state of
the American Dream? And, more important, how do you identify
the determinants that enable one family, or one kid, to shoot up
out of poverty while others are left behind? Well, if you’re an
economist, you do that with … data. Lots and lots of data.
CHETTY: And this specific angle we took is by using the large
data that we have now from administrative tax and Social
Security records where we’re able to see for the full population
what income distributions look like for kids and for parents.
And so you can basically ask, taking say, all of the kids born in
America in the 1980s, “What fraction of the kids born to low-
income families actually make it to the top of the income
distribution? How much intergenerational mobility is there in
America?” In the U.S., if you take, say, the set of children who
are born to families in the bottom quintile of the income
distribution, in the bottom fifth, about seven-and-a-half percent
of those kids make it to the top fifth of the income distribution.
DUBNER: And that number in isolation doesn’t sound off the
bat so bad.
CHETTY: Yeah, that’s right. Exactly. Seven-and-a-half percent,
is that a big number, is that a small number? It’s hard to judge

53. in isolation. So to give some context for that, I think Stephen,
it’s useful to start first by thinking about comparisons across
countries. So if you look at that number in other countries
where we have comparable data, like the United Kingdom, for
instance. In the U.K., that number is nine percent. A little bit
higher, but not all that much higher. If you go to a place like
Canada or Denmark, the number is 13 percent, or 13 and a half
percent. That’s quite a bit higher. And it’s useful, in thinking
about these numbers, is 13 percent a big number? Well, you
have to remember, of course, that no matter what you do, you
can’t have more than 20 percent of people in the top 20 percent,
right? So the maximum value this statistic can take, I think, is
plausibly 20 percent. To put it more precisely, if you lived in a
society where your parents played no role at all in determining
your outcomes, we’d expect one-fifth of kids to rise from the
bottom 20 percent to the top 20 percent. And so relative to that
benchmark, that upper bound, if you will, the 13 and a half
percent rate in Canada and the seven-and-a-half percent rate in
the U.S., that’s a really big difference. It’s almost like you’re
twice as likely to realize the American dream of moving up if
you’re growing up in Canada rather than the U.S, right?
DUBNER: Or perhaps more precisely, we should just call it the
Canadian Dream instead of the American Dream, if they’re
twice as good. Well, but what we want to know then is why,
right? What makes that more possible in Canada? So that’s what
your research is really about, yes, is about identifying the
factors that move that needle?
CHETTY: Exactly. Exactly. So that I think is kind of useful as
background, but there are lots of differences between Canada
and the U.S. The first of which is that Canada has less
inequality than the U.S. There’s less distance between the 20th
percentile and the 80th percentile in Canada, relative to
America.
DUBNER: Which means — so are you making a social point or

54. is this a statistical point? In other words, it’s easier to move
because it’s a smaller jump.
CHETTY: That’s exactly right. From a statistical point of view,
one view you could have is maybe the reason you see higher
upward mobility in Canada is not really so much that it is
actually easier to move up in Canada, but it’s easier to make
that move because it’s a shorter distance in a sense. So that’s
one example of why I think these cross-country comparisons,
while they can be motivating, in and of themselves it’s
inevitably going to be very difficult to say for sure what you
can learn from comparing Canada to the U.S. But I think before
we even get to the issue of why is the U.S. is different from
Canada, it turns out the story even in America itself is much
more nuanced. Within America, there are actually a number of
places that truly are lands of opportunity, places where kids
achieve the American Dream at high rates. In some places, like
in Salt Lake City, Utah, or in the Bay Area, something like 13
percent of kids are making it from the bottom fifth to the top
fifth. Turns out in the center of the country, like in Iowa, for
example, in many areas of Iowa you see more than 15 or 16
percent of kids making it from the bottom fifth to the top fifth.
So higher than the numbers we see in the data for Canada and
for Scandinavian countries. But at the other end of the
spectrum, you take places like Atlanta, Georgia; or Charlotte,
North Carolina; or much of the southeast of the U.S., and you
have rates of upward mobility below four-and-a-half percent.
Lower than any country for which we currently have data.
DUBNER: So that shouldn’t really, I guess, surprise us if you
know a little bit about the makeup and history of the United
States and the fact that we are states that have different
policies, different populations and then obviously counties and
cities that really differ a lot.
CHETTY: Yeah, I think that’s right. But I think that line of

55. thinking would lead you to think that most of this variation is
regional. But what’s perhaps more surprising is that as we zoom
in more finely we continue to find almost as much variation. So
kids growing up in San Francisco, for example, have about
twice the chance of climbing from the bottom to top as kids just
across the Bay Bridge in Oakland.
CHETTY: What you ended up finding was frankly I think
somewhat disappointing.
All right then: how do you engineer the possibility of the
American Dream?
CHETTY: We’ve identified five factors that seem to be
particularly strongly correlated with these differences.
* * *
The Stanford economist Raj Chetty has been working with large
data sets to try to understand why so many Americans are no
longer living the American Dream. When it comes to economic
opportunity, Chetty and his colleagues found huge regional and
even local differences throughout the U.S.
As he told us, kids growing up in San Francisco have about
twice the chance of living the American Dream as kids from just
across the bridge, in Oakland. Why? One easy explanation
would be that the people in those different areas are just
different – they have different abilities, different cultures,
different job opportunities. And that certainly has some
explanatory power. But Chetty and his colleagues found the
story isn’t that simple.
CHETTY: A lot of this variation is driven by differences in
childhood environment, as opposed to differences in conditions
in the labor market or the types of jobs that are available or
unemployment rates —things that affect you in adulthood.
How do the data explain that it’s the childhood environment
making the difference?

56. CHETTY: So we’re going to start by thinking about families
who move when their child is exactly 9 years old, alright? And
why age nine? That happens to be the earliest age we can
examine in currently available data.
DUBNER: And that’s not just because you were nine years old
when you moved from India to Milwaukee, is it?
CHETTY: Not, not quite.
DUBNER: Just a coincidence? Okay.
CHETTY: Interesting coincidence. And so when we look at
these nine-year-olds who move, we find that they end up
roughly halfway between the kids who grew up in Oakland from
birth and the kids who grew up in San Francisco from birth. So
they’re earning roughly $35,000 when we track them forward 21
years and measure their own incomes when they’re age 30. So
that’s for the kids who move when they’re exactly nine, right?
So now let’s replicate that for kids who move when they’re ten,
eleven, twelve, and so forth and so on. And what you end up
seeing in the data is a very clear declining pattern where the
later you make that move, from Oakland to San Francisco, the
less of the gain you get. And in fact, if you move after you’re
21 or 22 or so, you get absolutely no gain at all, and if you
move in your early 20s or when you’re 30, the relationship is
completely flat. There’s no further gain from moving. So this
sort of analysis leads us to the conclusion that first of all, where
you grow up matters. It’s not just that kids who live in Oakland
are somehow different from the kids who live in San Francisco.
Second, you see that neighborhood environment matters because
of childhood factors and not factors in adulthood, right?
This is hardly a new idea – that growing up in a poor
neighborhood isn’t the best launching ground for economic
success. This idea, in fact, led the Clinton Administration to
experiment in the mid-1990s with a program called Moving to

57. Opportunity.
CHETTY: They took about 5,000 families, across five large
cities in the U.S. including New York, Chicago, and Los
Angeles.
In New York for instance …
CHETTY: So, for instance, in New York, many of the families
were living in the Martin Luther King Towers, which is a very
high-poverty, large public-housing project in New York. They
took these families and they randomly assigned them to one of
three groups.
The first was a control group. They stayed put in the Martin
Luther King Towers.
CHETTY: And then there were two treatment groups, one of
which was called the Standard Section 8 Housing Voucher
Group.
This group could use the vouchers to move wherever they
wanted.
CHETTY: So many families, for example, moved to a place in
the mid-Bronx called Soundview, which is about six miles away
from the MLK Towers. So not in the super-high-concentrated-
poverty public-housing project, but not in a dramatically
different neighborhood either.
Families in the third group were also given a housing voucher.
CHETTY: However, with an additional restriction — which was
that you could only use this voucher to rent a house or
apartment in a place with a poverty rate below ten percent. So
basically trying to encourage families to move into more mixed-
income areas.
Hence the program’s name: Moving to Opportunity, or MTO.
The people behind the program suspected, or at least hoped, that
families who removed themselves from concentrated poverty
would end up having better outcomes themselves. For both the

58. adults already in the labor market and their kids, who’d be
coming into the labor market. So what happened?
CHETTY: What you ended up finding was frankly I think
somewhat disappointing. So you didn’t see any differences in
employment rates or average levels of earnings.
There were some positive health effects – lower obesity and
better mental health, for instance. But the MTO experiment was
largely considered a failure.
CHETTY: I think it left the field in kind of a difficult spot,
because people still instinctively felt and anecdotally felt like,
“Of course it’s got to matter where you grow up.” But this gold-
standard scientific experiment is telling us that it doesn’t matter
for economic outcomes.
That indeed was the consensus among researchers who analyzed
the MTO data. But several years later, Chetty and his
colleague Nathaniel Hendren wound up taking another look at
the data. And they saw a different picture. They saw a rather
large benefit among some people who had participated in MTO.
Why?
CHETTY: Our hypothesis was that earlier studies of MTO had
looked at impacts on adults and children who were older at the
point of the move.
Remember, the Moving to Opportunity experiment was
conducted in the mid-1990s. The studies that found
disappointing results were published roughly ten years later.
CHETTY: And, of course, the children who were very young at
the point the experiment was implemented — say, kids who
were 2 or 3 years old — 10 years after the experiment was
implemented, they were still only 12 and so obviously, you
couldn’t measure their earnings at that point because they
weren’t working yet. So these earlier studies for that reason
mainly focused on adults and older youth, and they didn’t find
much of an impact. But to us, in light of our findings on the

59. importance of childhood exposure, that actually made sense. We
thought, “Well, in our data, it looks like in order to really see
an effect of moving to a better neighborhood, you need many
years of exposure to that better neighborhood.”
And that’s what led Chetty and his colleagues to re-examine the
MTO data. They added a layer of IRS data, in order to measure
the longer-term earnings for the kids who were young when they
moved.
CHETTY: And, quite remarkably, and I still vividly remember
seeing this when we were studying this at the IRS, looking at
the data — when you look at children who moved when they
were young, you see extremely clearly that they are doing
dramatically better today as adults. They are earning 30 percent
more, they are 27 percent more likely to go to college, they’re
30 percent less likely to become single parents. And that, in our
view, just kind of completely changed everything and I think
has changed people’s perceptions of MTO.
Okay, so young kids who move out of a high-poverty
neighborhood do much better later on. What, exactly, does this
signify? What’s going on in the poor neighborhoods to depress
income mobility and what’s going on in the better
neighborhoods to increase it? Answering those questions has
become a big part of Raj Chetty’s work. He and his colleagues
have come up with five significant explanations.
CHETTY: The first is residential segregation. Cities that are
more segregated by income and by race tend to have much lower
levels of upward mobility. So if you look at a city like Atlanta
it’s an incredibly segregated city. Now cities that look like that,
in terms of residential structure, we find systematically tend to
have very low rates of upward mobility. In contrast, if you look
at a place like the Bay Area, at least in the 1980s and 1990s,
and this, Stephen, I think is changing quite a bit over time,
especially here in Silicon Valley as prices are rising, but in the
1980s and 1990s, the Bay Area was relatively integrated, at

60. least compared to Atlanta. Where you had neighborhoods of San
Francisco with both middle- and high-income people, you had
people of different ethnicities living near each other, and those
kinds of cities tend to have much higher rates of upward
mobility.
The second factor:
CHETTY: Income inequality. You have more people in the
middle class, you also tend to have higher levels of upward
mobility. This relationship is what Alan Krueger, based on
cross-country data, termed the Great Gatsby Curve. The idea
that there’s a link between inequality in any one generation and
rates of intergenerational mobility. Why is this link interesting
if one can interpret it causally? It suggests that as we have
growing inequality over time, as we do in the U.S., we might be
concerned about that not just because we’re worried about
equitable distribution, but also because we’re worried that it
might erode children’s chances of achieving the American
Dream. And so, again, we don’t know exactly what the
mechanism is and whether this is really a causal effect —
inequality causing changes in upward mobility—but there does
seem to be some link between these two factors.
The third factor they identified relates to family.
CHETTY: It turns out that the single strongest correlation we
find in the data is with measures of family structure, such as the
fraction of single parents living in an area. We find that places
with more single parents have significantly lower levels of
upward mobility. Now in interpreting this correlation, it’s very
important to note that it’s not purely driven by the fact that
growing up in a one-parent family leads to worse outcomes for
children. And the way you can see that is if we look at the
subset of kids who grow up in a two-parent household, we see
that for that subset of children, even for them, growing up in
neighborhood with a lot of single parents is associated with
lower levels of upward mobility. So it’s not literally about
whether your own parents are married or not — again, it’s
picking up some community-level factor where growing up in a

61. place that has a lot of single parents — maybe there’s more
family instability or it’s correlated with some third factor that is
leading to higher rates of single parenthood. For whatever
reason, that seems to be strongly associated with lower levels of
upward mobility.
The fourth factor:
CHETTY: Social capital. And so the idea of social capital — I
think of it in relation to the old adage that it takes a village to
raise a child. Will someone else in your community help you out
when you need help? So as an example, Salt Lake City with the
Mormon Church is thought to be the quintessential example of a
city with a lot of social capital. And correspondingly in our
data, seems to exhibit a lot of social mobility. Now this concept
of social capital, as you might know, was popularized in a very
well-known book by Bob Putnam called Bowling Alone.
Indeed, we put out an episode not long ago, called “Trust Me,”
with Bob Putnam, who teaches public policy at Harvard. Years
ago, he was looking at the decline of civic life in America.
Bob PUTNAM: We were becoming more and more isolated. Or
as a friend suggested to me once, “You mean we’re bowling
alone?”
CHETTY: And the reason for the title of that book is social
capital is notoriously difficult to measure. And Bob had the
creative idea of using the number of bowling alleys in an area,
and in particular whether people are bowling alone, as a proxy
for social capital.
PUTNAM:The core idea of social capital is so simple that I’m
almost embarrassed to say it. It is that social networks have
value. There’s a huge amount of work on how social networks
help us find jobs.
CHETTY: So I was amazed to find, I remember actually
discussing this with Bob in his office at Harvard, that the

62. number of bowling alleys is actually very highly correlated with
the rates of upward mobility in our own data.
DUBNER: Were you skeptical when you first looked at that?
CHETTY: Yeah, I was surprised, certainly. I also thought,
Wow, Bob really had some foresight in thinking about bowling
alleys. But I mention that here because it illustrates a caveat to
all of these relationships because these are all correlations
rather than causal effects, right? And so it would be surprising
if the policy implication to draw from this is that we should
build more bowling alleys to increase upward mobility in the
United States. And so I think that’s a very important caveat to
keep in mind. I mention that because the fifth factor is a bit of
an exception to that. The fifth factor is school quality.
CHETTY: We find that places with better public schools, as you
might expect intuitively, have much higher rates of upward
mobility. And on that dimension, there’s a lot of very good
evidence showing that improving the quality of schools can
really, meaningfully, affect rates of intergenerational mobility.
So I would treat school quality a little bit differently from the
other four factors, where we see strong correlations, but are not
yet sure exactly what the causal mechanisms are.
DUBNER: Now each of the factors that you’ve discussed, even
I could think of some potential policy ideas to improve them.
Do you think much about that, or are you content at this point to
do the research that allows policymakers to have those ideas
and make those moves?
CHETTY: Absolutely, we want to take the next step to think
about what this means for policy, what the causal mechanisms
are, what the levers are, that we can push to change some of
these factors. So that I think is a good segue now to come back
to the Moving to Opportunity experiment, which I see as a way

63. to potentially tackle segregation. One concrete way in which
you might try to integrate a city is by giving low-income
families housing assistance, to be able to rent houses in more
mixed-income neighborhoods. Thereby mechanically reducing
segregation.
DUBNER: Now, I could hear you talking about this, extolling
the virtues, the latent virtues, that you ultimately unearthed of a
program like Moving to Opportunity, where the government
spends a bunch of money to relocate families, and I could think,
“Oh, you’re just another big-government-spending advocate.”
On the other hand, I know that you have thought quite a bit
about the money that is spent in the U.S. on a variety of
affordable housing programs, I believe a total of roughly $45
billion. So I’m curious as an economist how you would assess
the efficiency of typical or historical housing spending in the
U.S., and compare that to the ROI on something like Moving to
Opportunity.
CHETTY: I certainly recognize that in a time when we have a
government that’s already spending quite a bit on initiatives
like this, the answer can’t simply be to just spend more on these
problems. I think the power of these data and what we need to
be doing is spending money in smarter ways. And so this is a
good example of a program, where we’re spending $45 billion
on various forms of affordable housing, but we’re not spending
that money in the most efficient possible way in order to
achieve outcomes like reduced poverty in the long-run. So let
me give you a couple of examples on dimensions in which we
can, I think, make improvements. First , the optimal age at
which to help families move is when their kids are born or when
their kids are very young. In practice, we do almost exactly the
opposite. We put families on waiting lists when they have kids,
and those waiting lists sometimes take many, many years,
particularly in the most depressed cities where we really would
like to be moving families out of concentrated poverty. And so

64. what ends up happening is that families only get the opportunity
to move exactly when their kids are older, which is exactly
backwards, right, in terms of what you’d like to be
accomplishing here. So that’s a tweak that would not increase
program costs but I think would dramatically increase impact.
Another example is that the vast majority of housing vouchers
are currently being used in very high-poverty, low-opportunity
areas. And that is problematic, because we find that it’s really
critical to move to these higher-opportunity, low-poverty areas
in order to see beneficial outcomes. And so we’re working with
HUD and a large group of public-housing authorities to figure
out how, again, without spending more money, how we might be
able to reform the program so we can get more families that get
these vouchers to move to neighborhoods that are going to
better serve their kids in the long-run. A further important
aspect to think about in the context of cost is that my sense is
that the government will actually recover much of the money we
invest in programs like this because we see that these children
who are earning 30 percent more as adults — they of course are
paying more in income taxes themselves as they have higher
earnings. And so we calculate that the extra income taxes that
they pay actually more than offsets the incremental cost of a
program like Moving to Opportunity. So it’s actually a, we
think, a budget-saving program in many ways.
DUBNER: Your work has been cited by politicians certainly
across the aisle — by Paul Ryan, you’ve personally
tutored Hillary Clinton in mobility issues and perhaps others,
you’ve advised the Obama Administration and advised Jeb
Bush — I’m really curious to know how, well, I was going to
ask you how it feels to have that policy pull, I don’t know if
you actually have pull, but at least you’re in the room and you
are looked to as an authority who really understands or can
explain cause and effect in addressing these issues that
policymakers deal with all the time, often not in an evidence-
based manner. So could you just talk about that — what those

65. conversations are like, if you feel they’re fruitful, if you feel
your research is considered seriously and perhaps even acted
upon?
CHETTY: Yes. I am quite encouraged by how interested
policymakers are in this type of evidence, and I think there is a
genuine interest, often on both sides of the aisle, in trying to do
better things with the money that we’re spending. I think when
you can come into a room and say, “I’m not saying we should
spend an extra $30 billion on affordable housing, I’m saying we
should take the money we’re already spending and maybe tweak
it in certain ways and enact certain reforms, that based on the
evidence will actually deliver better outcomes that we all want
to achieve.” I think that can really be impactful. My sense is by
the way, a lot of the political influence that matters here is not
just at the national level, but at the local level, given the nature
of the problem. Mayors can do a lot. We noticed mayors are
talking about things differently. Our hope is ultimately the
evidence that we’re accumulating and a number of other
researchers will ultimately influence policy.
Since our interview with Raj Chetty, he has met for an hour-
and-a-half with Ben Carson, the presumptive Secretary of
Housing and Urban Development. As Chetty described it in an
e-mail: “He and his staff were eager to hear about how the data
could help us make better use of the dollars HUD is spending to
achieve better outcomes for low-income children.”
We asked Chetty if he’d consider serving in this Administration
himself. “I would not have considered serving in either a Trump
or Clinton administration, largely because I’d like to continue
focusing on research to identify the best policy solutions at this
point. Perhaps down the road I’d reconsider.” Chetty also wrote
this: “I hope that the new administration will take an evidence-
based approach to making policy decisions, for instance by
making smart investments in childhood education, affordable
housing, and other programs that can create opportunity in
effective ways.”

66. If you want to look at some of the research by Raj Chetty and
his colleagues on the Equality of Opportunity Project, I suggest
you spend some time on their website. You can look it up:
Equality of Opportunity Project. And next time
on Freakonomics Radio, we’ll expand this conversation about
the state of the American Dream.
One argument we’ve all heard is that the U.S. was too willing to
let its manufacturing jobs go to China and elsewhere.
Economists were for the most part sanguine; they told us not to
worry, that the upsides of global trade would cancel out the
downsides of that job loss. What do they say now?
David AUTOR: I’m much less sanguine about it than I used to
be. I think if we had realized how traumatic the pace of change
would have been, we would have at a minimum had much better
policies in place to assist workers in communities that suffered
these very severe and immediate consequences and we might
have tried to moderate the pace at which it occurred.
* * *
Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner
Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky. Our
staff also includes Shelley Lewis, Christopher Werth, Stephanie
Tam, Merritt Jacob, Eliza Lambert, Alison Hockenberry, Emma
Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, and Brian Gutierrez, and we had
help on this episode from Andrew Dunn and Noam Osband. You
can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on iTunes or wherever
else you get your podcasts.
Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in
this episode:
SOURCES
· Raj Chetty, Professor of economics at Stanford University
· Robert D. Putnam, Professor of public olicy at Harvard
University
RESOURCES

67. · “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income
Mobility Since 1940,” by Raj Chetty et al, December 2016
(NBER Working Paper)
· “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility:
Childhood Exposure Effects and County-Level Estimates,” by
Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, May 2015 (NBER Working
Paper)
· “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on
Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity
Experiment,” by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence
F. Katz, American Economic Review, 2015
· “Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of
Intergenerational Mobility in the United States,” by Raj Chetty,
Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel
Saez, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2014
· “Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent
Trends in Intergenerational Mobility,” by Nathaniel Hendren,
Patrick Kline, Emmanuel Saez, and Nick Turner, American
Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, 2014
· Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam, 2001
New York Times
“The American Dream, Quantified at Last”
By David Leonhardt
Dec. 8, 2016
The phrase “American dream” was invented during the Great
Depression. It comes from a popular 1931 book by the historian
James Truslow Adams, who defined it as “that dream of a land
in which life should be better and richer and fuller for
everyone.”
In the decades that followed, the dream became a reality.
Thanks to rapid, widely shared economic growth, nearly all
children grew up to achieve the most basic definition of a better
life — earning more money and enjoying higher living
standards than their parents had.

68. These days, people are arguably more worried about the
American dream than at any point since the Depression. But
there has been no real measure of it, despite all of the data
available. No one has known how many Americans are more
affluent than their parents were — and how the number has
changed.
It’s a thorny research question, because it requires tracking
individual families over time rather than (as most economic
statistics do) taking one-time snapshots of the country.
The beginnings of a breakthrough came several years ago, when
a team of economists led by Raj Chetty received access to
millions of tax records that stretched over decades. The records
were anonymous and came with strict privacy rules, but
nonetheless allowed for the linking of generations.
The resulting research is among the most eye-opening
economics work in recent years. You’ve probably heard some of
the findings even if you don’t realize it. They have shown that
the odds of escaping poverty vary widely by region, for
instance, an insight that has influenced federal housing policy.
After the research began appearing, I mentioned to Chetty, a
Stanford professor, and his colleagues that I thought they had a
chance to do something no one yet had: create an index of the
American dream. It took them months of work, using old Census
data to estimate long-ago decades, but they have done it.
They’ve constructed a data set that shows the percentage of
American children who earn more money — and less money —
than their parents earned at the same age.
The index is deeply alarming. It’s a portrait of an economy that
disappoints a huge number of people who have heard that they
live in a country where life gets better, only to experience
something quite different.
Their frustration helps explain not only this year’s disturbing
presidential campaign but also Americans’ growing distrust of
nearly every major societal institution, including the federal

69. government, corporate America, labor unions, the news media
and organized religion.
Yet the data also helps point the way to some promising
solutions.
It begins with children who were born in 1940, less than a
decade after the publication of Adams’s book, “The Epic of
America.” The researchers went into the project assuming that
most of these children had earned more than their parents — but
were surprised to learn that nearly all of them had, said David
Grusky, one of the researchers, also of Stanford. About 92
percent of 1940 babies had higher pretax inflation-adjusted
household earnings at age 30 than their parents had at the same
age. (The results were similar at older ages and for post-tax
earnings.)
The few 1940 children who earned less than their parents were
also, for the most part, doing just fine. They were generally
earning less because they had grown up rich — children of top
corporate executives, say, who became, or married, doctors,
lawyers or professors.
Achieving the American dream was a virtual guarantee for this
generation, regardless of whether people went to college, got
divorced or suffered a layoff. Why? Because they spent their
prime working years in an economy with two wonderful
features. It was growing rapidly, and the bounty from its growth
flowed to the rich, the middle class and the poor alike.
Not even the oldest baby boomers, born in the late 1940s and
early 1950s, would be quite so lucky. Economic growth began
to slow as they were entering the job market in the 1970s,
thanks in part to the energy crises. Still, more than three-
quarters of these early Baby Boomers would ultimately make
more than their parents.
You can see the effects on the American dream in the charts
here. Each line shows the percentage of children born in a given
year who out-earned their parents, with children who grew up
poor on the left and rich on the right. The line steadily falls

70. over time, across every economic class.
{To see all charts, follow the link in list of reading links}
In the 1980s, economic inequality began to rise, a result of
globalization, technological change, government policies
favoring the well-off and a slowdown in educational attainment
and the work force’s skill level. Together, these forces pinched
the incomes of the middle class and the poor. The tech boom of
the 1990s helped — slowing the decline of the American dream
— but only temporarily.
For babies born in 1980 — today’s 36-year-olds — the index of
the American dream has fallen to 50 percent: Only half of them
make as much money as their parents did. In the industrial
Midwestern states that effectively elected Donald Trump, the
share was once higher than the national average. Now, it is a
few percentage points lower. There, going backward is the
norm.
Psychology research has shown that people’s happiness is
heavily influenced by their relative station in life. And it’s hard
to imagine a more salient comparison than to a person’s own
parents, particularly at this time of year, when families gather
for rituals that have been repeated for decades. “You’re going
home for the holidays and you compare your standard of living
to your parents,” Grusky, a sociologist, says. “It’s one of the
few ties you have over the course of your entire life. Friends
come and go. Parents are a constant.”
How, then, can the country revive Adams’s dream of a “better
and richer and fuller” life for everyone? The solution has to
involve some combination of faster economic growth and more
widely shared growth.
The bad news is that lifting G.D.P. growth is terribly difficult.
Trump has promised to do so, but offered few specifics. If
anything, he favors some of the same policies (deregulation and
tax cuts) that have failed in recent decades.
The better news — potentially — is that lifting growth is the

71. less important half of the equation, notes Nathaniel Hendren of
Harvard, another of the researchers: The rise of inequality has
damaged the American dream more than the growth slowdown.
One way to think about inequality’s role is to remember that the
American economy is far larger and more productive than in
1980, even if it isn’t growing as rapidly. Per-capita G.D.P. is
almost twice as high now. By itself, that increase should allow
most children to live better than their parents.
They don’t, however, because the fruits of growth have gone
disproportionately to the affluent.
The researchers ran a clever simulation recreating the last
several decades with the same G.D.P. growth but without the
post-1970 rise in inequality. When they did, the share of 1980
babies who grew up to out-earn their parents jumped to 80
percent, from 50 percent. The rise was considerably smaller (to
62 percent) in the simulation that kept inequality constant but
imagined that growth returned to its old, faster path.
“We need to have more equal growth if we want to revive the
American dream,” Chetty says.
Given today’s high-tech, globalized economy, the single best
step would be to help more middle- and low-income children
acquire the skills that lead to good-paying jobs. Notably, most
college graduates still earn more than their parents did, other
data show — yes, even after taking into account student debt.
But education is not the only answer. Incomes have also
stagnated because of the rise of corporate power and the
weakening of labor unions, leading profits to rise at the expense
of wages. The decline of two-parent families plays a role, too.
And tax policy has not done enough to push back against these
forces: The middle class, not the affluent, deserves a tax cut.
The painful irony of 2016 is that nostalgia and anger over the
fading American dream helped elect a president who may put
the dream even further out of reach for many people — taking
away their health insurance, supporting ineffective school
vouchers and showering government largess on the rich. Every
one of those issues will be worth a fight.

72. If the American dream could survive the Depression, and then
thrive in a way few people imagined, it can survive our current
troubles.
Kevin Quealy contributed research.