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From the Wall Street Journal:
Economist Raj Chetty’s Proposals on Inequality Draw Interest on Both Sides of the Political Aisle
Plans for increasing upward mobility appeal to Democrats and Republicans alike in presidential campaign
By BOB DAVIS
Updated Oct. 20, 2015 9:11 p.m. ETCAMBRIDGE, Mass.—In a presidential campaign where candidates from both parties are blaming globalization for a shrinking middle class, a 36-year-old India-born economist has a different explanation: Bad neighborhoods and bad teachers rob poor children of the chance to climb into the middle class.
His solution? Help the children and their families move to better neighborhoods.
What makes Harvard University’s Raj Chetty notable isn’t just his views, but his reach. He has advised Republican and Democrats alike, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama White House. In a political year marked by anger and strong partisanship, his research could help smooth some of the hard edges of the income-inequality debate running through the 2016 presidential campaign.
His research finds that upward mobility depends on government policies, a position common among Democrats, as well as on neighborhood churches and two-parent families, as Republicans contend.
“Chetty’s work challenges preconceived notions on both sides” of the political divide, says Avik Roy, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who advises Republican campaigns.
Policy advisers say they expect to roll out proposals bearing his imprint as the campaign unfolds. Mrs. Clinton is examining his research into housing vouchers as she crafts domestic policies. Mr. Bush is figuring out how to strengthen neighborhoods as a way to boost mobility. The White House has drawn on his work in setting housing policy.
That makes Mr. Chetty one of the few people affecting both sides in the presidential debate. He brings to the task formidable credentials: Harvard PhD at age 23; university tenure at 27; and a MacArthur “genius grant” at 33, the same age he won the John Bates Clark medal for best American economist under the age of 40. He says he was drawn to mobility as a subject, in part, because of what he saw as the vast differences in opportunity between the U.S. and his native India, which he left at age nine.
“He’s the closest thing I have ever seen to a real live Mr. Spock, half Vulcan, half human,” said Harvard economist Lawrence Katz, a former Clinton administration economist, who has known Mr. Chetty since he was a Harvard undergraduate. “He knows where to look to find the right data and what to do to answer the most important questions with it. But unlike many technical economists, he’s concerned with real people and the disadvantaged.”
Responds Mr. Chetty: “I consider that a compliment.” He says he won’t register to vote because he thinks that could bias his “laboratory science” approach to economic research.
Mr. Chetty and the economists he works with tackle problems that seem intractable, and offer hopeful prescriptions. Consider economic inequality—the income spread between rich, middle-class and poor. Mr. Chetty addresses the issue indirectly. He examines income mobility, which he defines as the ability to rise from the lowest 20th percentile of income distribution to the top 80th percentile in one generation. Climbing that ladder is more important than ever, he says, because the distance between the economic classes is greater than in the past
By analyzing tax records of families in 741 geographic districts, he pinpoints hotbeds of opportunity. Poorer children in Salt Lake City, for example, are twice as likely to reach the top fifth in income as those in Atlanta, though personal income in the cities is about the same.
High-mobility metro areas have a combination of greater economic and racial integration, better schools and a smaller fraction of single-parent families than lower-mobility areas. Integration is lagging in Atlanta, he said. “The strongest predictors of upward mobility are measures of family structure,” Mr. Chetty said.
His proposal: move poor children to high-mobility communities and remove the impediments to mobility in poor-performing neighborhoods. He now is working with the Obama administration on ways to encourage landlords in higher-opportunity neighborhoods to take in poor families by paying landlords more or guaranteeing rent payment.
“The view that we’ll fix the American dream at the national level is probably not the right way to look at the problem,” he said. “What needs to be fixed in Salt Lake City is very different from what needs to be fixed in Cleveland or Atlanta.”
To Chetty’s credit, his 2015 analysis of his giant database of your IRS returns (hopefully anonymized) in 1996-2000 versus your dependents’ in 2011-2012 was much improved over his 2013 attempt at make sense of his data.
But despite all the publicity it gets, his Equality of Opportunity project has been exposed to virtually no in-depth criticism as of yet, other than my long Taki’s column where I went through his highest and lowest mobility counties one by one.
The good news is that many of his county-level findings make excellent sense. There are good reasons why Sioux County, Iowa saw the highest growth in income for children whose families were in the bottom half of the national income distribution in 1996-2000 to what the now young adults are making in 2011-2012 (Sioux County benefited from a large farm boom combined with a nice combination of social conservatism and strong education), while Shannon County was the worst (it’s the Pine Ridge reservation, which is probably the most consistently tragic place in the country).
In other words, Chetty’s rankings pass some basic reality checks with flying colors: Pine Ridge is notoriously horrible, while when I read up on Sioux County, Iowa (where, unlike Shannon County, South Dakota, there aren’t many Sioux), it appears to be about as fine a farm county as there is in the Midwest: it’s where the record price of $20,000 per acre of regular farmland was set in 2013. On the other hand, farmland prices are down from their 2013 peak, and there have been lots of eras during my lifetime, such as the 1980s, when being from a farm county wasn’t good for your income. So Chetty’s confidence that his findings from over one timespan will apply to future timespans seems overblown.
The bad news, however, is that much of Chetty’s findings are due to methodological flaws that substitute noise for actionable policy-relevant findings. Chetty claims he’s uncovering enduring patterns that we can all learn from. But as I wrote last spring:
In summary, Chetty’s data still suffers from crippling problems with:
– Regression toward the mean (especially among races)
– Temporary booms and busts
– Cost of living differences.
For example, in the WSJ graph above of percentage of young adults who grew up at the 20th percentile in income in the later 1990s who are now at the 80th percentile: San Jose (i.e., Silicon Valley) and Newark (the giant New Jersey suburban commuting zone popular among Wall Street employees, rather than just the inner city of Newark) benefited from vast booms in tech and Wall Street. In contrast, the greater Charlotte area, which was prospering up through 2008, has been hammered by the subsequent collapse in home-building, furniture-making, and lumbering due to the Housing Bust.
Also Silicon Valley and the New York suburbs have gotten even more expensive from the later 1990s to this current decade, and Chetty fails to adjust for the rise in the cost of housing.
And Salt Lake City does better than heavily black areas like Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Charlotte because it’s mostly white, and whites regress toward higher income means than blacks. In contrast, in Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Charlotte, most people at the 20th percentile in the 1990s were black, and blacks regress over the generations toward lower mean incomes.
It would not be impossible for Chetty to come up with methodological fixes for these obvious problems with his findings. He improved his work from 2013 to 2015, suggesting he has internal motivation to do better. Maybe he’ll fix his faults between 2015 and 2017? But right now he’s under very little external pressure to improve since nobody else seems to have noticed what he’s done wrong.
For example, here’s another piece from the WSJ about how everybody who is anybody is totally wowed by Chetty’s study and intends to use it to social engineer America:
How to Turn ‘Pure Scientist’s’ Ideas into Policy
By BOB DAVIS
In early June, 50 officials from across the government crammed into the offices of the Council of Economic Advisers to hear a lecture by Harvard economist Raj Chetty on economic mobility, twice the usual turnout for visiting economists. Earlier in the day, he conferred one-on-one with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. The day before, he met with several other cabinet secretaries.
… But he is especially popular at the White House. President Barack Obama has met at least twice with him personally and singled out his work on education and teacher testing in the 2012 State of the Union address.
“What’s great about him is that he’s a pure scientist,” said White House chief economist Jason Furman.
Mr. Chetty is advising the Department of Housing and Urban Development how to remake its housing voucher program, which the poor use to pay for rent.
Through studies with other authors, Mr. Chetty has found that a) communities vary greatly in their ability to help the poor to rise into the middle class; b) children who move from low-mobility neighborhoods to high-mobility ones have big gains in lifetime earnings; c) the younger the kid who moves, the greater the impact; and d) the outcome is different with older teenagers. If anything, the dislocation of moving often sets them back
HUD now is in the midst of a pilot project in Dallas that encourages families to move to higher-mobility parts of the Dallas metropolitan area – more racially integrated places where there are better schools and fewer one-parent families. Voucher payments are higher for such neighborhoods to cover higher rents. HUD officials want to expand the program to other metropolitan areas where it could include as many as 400,000 people.
But how many quantitatively-oriented Americans have time to look at Chetty’s data about what are the best counties to raise your children in when there are important baseball statistics to analyze?
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Frankly, I think Chetty would be of more use if he’d do a complete and thorough comparison between his native India’s caste structure and US racial stratification.
I, for one, would be interested in his findings.
What isn't known is the stealth immigration of Dalits (bottom caste Indians) and their myriad contributions to betterment of life in the US. It isn't known because there has been about zero chance of a Dalit migrating. However, all is not lost, because at least in the US, a Dalit could have slightly more than the ghost of a chance of advancing that would be faced in India.Replies: @WhatEvvs
In other words, help the bad neighborhoods move to better neighborhoods, i.e., turn the better neighborhoods into worse neighborhoods.
In other words, a profoundly stupid idea.
It has been going on for a long time via Section 8. And the Obama administration is ramping it up:
HUD now is in the midst of a pilot project in Dallas that encourages families to move to higher-mobility parts of the Dallas metropolitan area – more racially integrated places where there are better schools and fewer one-parent families. Voucher payments are higher for such neighborhoods to cover higher rents. HUD officials want to expand the program to other metropolitan areas where it could include as many as 400,000 people.
WAR ON SUBURBS: OBAMA, JULIAN CASTRO REV UP AFFIRMATIVE ACTION HOUSING
Raj Chetty was even mentioned in the Ferguson Commission report.
And the bottom 20% are closer to the mean to begin with.
His solution? Help the children and their families move to better neighborhoods.
IOW, 21st century Negro removal.
Steve did you read this? It’s pretty much the epitome of steve sailorisms….
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html?_r=0
There was a recent book by Goldin and Katz called The Race between Education and Technology. It showed the utterly unsurprising result that blue collar workers who had more technical jobs had had more education too.
But even though this was unsurprising, the book made waves because, see, that meant somehow there were now more skilled jobs being created than workers and that meant wage inequality. And that was bad! Wage compression good! And we needed more education to fix that we weren’t educating people up to these mythical high skill blue collar jobs. So they could all be poorer together.
Which was already an absurd conclusion. More jobs than people: bad because it lacks wage compression.
But what was even more frustrating was the arguments were all based on relative inequality in income over decades. Wage compression was ‘unexplainable” except by ‘education” without them ever even looking at Marginal Income Tax Rates.
They didn’t even dispense with the concern over tax rates on income–just never thought of it. Hey, is it possible that Marginal tax rates being high might lead to wage compression when comparing wages?
Whenever I read that Chetty doesn’t even account for relative cost of living increases or the effects of the AMT over those years, I know the rest is garbage. Sure, the stopped clock is right a few times, but honestly, it’s garbage.
When I read this I think, “save us from those who would save us,” which, by the way, is the title of a (not particularly good) 1983 heavy metal song by one of many heavy metal bands called Hell.
Of course, they probably didn’t have Social Justice Whingers in mind.
“His solution? Help the children and their families move to better neighborhoods.”
If you live in one of these lucky new Banlieues — sell now. They’re coming.
“HUD now is in the midst of a pilot project in Dallas that encourages families to move to higher-mobility parts of the Dallas metropolitan area ”
In other words, to move up move up.
I wonder. In my field of study, the past decade saw a very large number of Indian-born superstars. And the main reason I noticed it is because almost all of them are charlatans. They pretend, they pose and proclaim but ultimately everything they do is either bullshit or thoroughly unoriginal stuff masquerading as progress. It almost seems like some Indians have very high verbal IQ that allows them to bullshit disproportionally to the highest levels. With that, not that I know anything about new Microsoft CEO, I still wonder if the guy will ultimately ruin an iconic American company because his only real skill is advancing his own career.
Microsoft employs very few Americans relative to its income, pays almost no taxes, and if Microsoft goes under it means less of the wrong kind of positive foreign trade: the kind that makes creeps like Gates who contribute to left-wing causes rich.
I would love to see the United States unhorsed in jet engines, MRI machines, semiconductor process equipment and so forth because we need to be forced into developing smokestack industry that hires a lot of people. The extreme high value stuff employs relatively few people, and few people have any emotional connections to jet engines, locomotives, bulldozers, and the like. Seeing American names, and knowing Americans engineered and built the products to which they are attached, on washing machines, cars, etc, is important.
If Microsoft goes under, most home and small business users will wind up going to free software, with or without commercial "dessert toppings" like MacOS X.
Let the Microsoft stockholder learn a good lesson.Replies: @Jean Cocteausten, @bomag
Also what’s left out is different places have different mobility for different peoples. Upwardly mobile black people in Harlem move to the South to live better lives. Upwardly mobile White people are moving to Harlem.
Many of today’s bad neighborhoods were once very nice places to live. Individual neighborhoods rise or fall based solely on who is occupying them.
San Jose, Charlotte, and Salt Lake City sound like good places to raise your children.
I’d probably avoid Newark, Cleveland, and Milwaukee.
Let’s talk about India’s culture of scam. (Is the word “scam” from India?)
From Ghandi to Deepak Chopra to J. Krishnamurti to the guru who conned the Beatles. Smooth talkers full of sh*t.
Whenever I hear a high IQ sub-continent type start droning on about weighty issues I HOLD ONTO MY WALLET.
Raj Chetty is another snake oil salesman. Buyer beware.
Stinky yoga mat alert. Kooky dietary restrictions alert. Batsh*t crazy religion alert.
I don’t care if he left the old country as a kid. These folks carry the the culture in their very DNA, in their essence.
I have a much better and cheaper solution that this Indian “scientist” seems to have obviously overlooked. Lets move all our poor minorities to India, where the level of economic success is measured with half-pennies and human organ operations. In India, our poor blacks would see virtually no difference in their poverty and the natives of India. Think of the enrichment our negroes could bring to the prosaic and undiverse Indians. They can join our Great Global Village now by having Africa living next door instead of way out on a different continent. I wonder how Chetti would greet this idea? I think we all know the answer already don’t we? Its not rocket science, you don’t even have to be an Aryan to understand it.
Why in heaven’s name would any American listen to a propeller-head Indian Hindu Brahmin immigrant academic economist idiot savant?
Are our rulers that clueless? “Help me, Obi-wan Chetty! You are my only hope!”
His brilliant discovery is to dump poor Negros and Mexicans into white middle class neighborhoods? This is “new” thinking? Busing, school integration, residential integration, quotas, mixed income housing and Section 8 have been around for decades.
Let him take his expertise back to India and solve their problems. He knows their languages, cultures, religions, myths, cuisines, legends, celebrations, histories, songs, liturgies, bereavements, triumphs, and soul.
He doesn’t know us. Nor will he ever, even if he dropped everything, threw on a backpack and went on walkabout for 20 years.
Mayor Daly pulled something to make for luxury housing. The poor black and hispanics were sent out of Chicago to bring crime and drugs to suburban Illinois.
New York City did the same thing to Albany, N.Y., creating new ghettos, high crime areas and extreme poverty in a city that had no good paying jobs for such a huge influx of new comers.
I always wanted to start a free bus service from Texas and Arizona for all the illegals who crossed over the border and were immediately caught and released by the Border Patrol after being given a summons to appear. The buses would take them directly to Town Hall, Greenwich Connecticut. I just want to see their reaction.
It’s not particularly hard to get an idea of social class in communities when one is familiar with government data. Money is actually a horrible indicator for class in communities because of all the complications. Two possibilities are to look use American Community Survey (or long form Census for older reports) data to track education attainment or to use that data to track the ratio of income to median rent in communities. Education is a decent proxy because there’s a solid assumption that the greater percentage of people in an area with postsecondary education, the higher the social class in a community. In particular, figures like graduate education are a good proxy for upper middle class composition. The income to rent ratio also gives a decent idea of cost of living that can be used to correct for gross income problems. If Chetty wanted to make a more accurate representation, then he could use very readily available information without any problems to do so.
I swear, Chetty is almost as infuriating as Richard Florida with his nonsense (I’m a trained social scientist so I hate this malarky), but it the Atlantic’s CityLab is any example, then hopefully some magazine is going to give Chetty an internet ghetto that respectable people only have to pretend to pay attention to.
As if I would be heartbroken if Microsoft were ruined.
Microsoft employs very few Americans relative to its income, pays almost no taxes, and if Microsoft goes under it means less of the wrong kind of positive foreign trade: the kind that makes creeps like Gates who contribute to left-wing causes rich.
I would love to see the United States unhorsed in jet engines, MRI machines, semiconductor process equipment and so forth because we need to be forced into developing smokestack industry that hires a lot of people. The extreme high value stuff employs relatively few people, and few people have any emotional connections to jet engines, locomotives, bulldozers, and the like. Seeing American names, and knowing Americans engineered and built the products to which they are attached, on washing machines, cars, etc, is important.
If Microsoft goes under, most home and small business users will wind up going to free software, with or without commercial “dessert toppings” like MacOS X.
Let the Microsoft stockholder learn a good lesson.
What America needs to be unhorsed from is finance, real estate and other non-value-added crap. It'll be a great day when MIT sends its smartest grads to engineering jobs again instead of hedge funds.
Probably not going to happen in this environment. Too much EPA, and it is cheaper to ship it in.
Service economy uber alles, baby.
As Evelyn Waugh said, “Papers will be judged on length, and length alone.”
I, for one, would be interested in his findings.Replies: @Ivy
Brahmin invasion of US IT in Silicon Valley, Redmond (Microsoft) and other techy areas (courtesy of the H-1B Visa scam – write your Congressman) is known. Brahmins self-select via marrying within caste.
What isn’t known is the stealth immigration of Dalits (bottom caste Indians) and their myriad contributions to betterment of life in the US. It isn’t known because there has been about zero chance of a Dalit migrating. However, all is not lost, because at least in the US, a Dalit could have slightly more than the ghost of a chance of advancing that would be faced in India.
Are our rulers that clueless? "Help me, Obi-wan Chetty! You are my only hope!"
His brilliant discovery is to dump poor Negros and Mexicans into white middle class neighborhoods? This is "new" thinking? Busing, school integration, residential integration, quotas, mixed income housing and Section 8 have been around for decades.
Let him take his expertise back to India and solve their problems. He knows their languages, cultures, religions, myths, cuisines, legends, celebrations, histories, songs, liturgies, bereavements, triumphs, and soul.
He doesn't know us. Nor will he ever, even if he dropped everything, threw on a backpack and went on walkabout for 20 years.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @greysquirrell, @jill
It ought to be kind of obvious that the dynamic duo of Raj Chetty and Emmanuel Saez are somewhat hindered by a lack of familiarity with places in America. But the real problem is that nobody seems to have told them that they ought to study up online about the places they’ve identified as high or low on their various metrics.
For example, I wasn’t familiar with Sioux County, Iowa until I saw that it came in #1 on one of Chetty & Saez’s income mobility measures. So then I spent a couple of hours reading about it. It’s a rather interesting place.
I wound up reading about 100+ counties at the top and bottom of their rankings and made up a table of facts about them. From doing this it was pretty obvious what three big problems are with their methodology. But I do know some basic things about American life, like race matters, cost of living matters, and economic booms and busts matter.
But a more subtle problem is that a lot of quantitative analysts seem to think it’s bad form to look at examples from your data. That’s anecdotal evidence! And the top and bottom 50 counties are outliers so you shouldn’t pay attention to them!
Nah, it’s actually extremely useful to look in some systematic depth at all the examples from the top and bottom of whatever statistical distribution you are trying to make sense of. I don’t know exactly why this is considered such a weird, controversial technique for making sense out of data. My guess is that it’s part of professional hoodoo of statistical analysts: they like to discourage people from noticing patterns from examples. It drums up business for them by discouraging people from noticing what’s in front of their noses.
It’s too early to say how Nadella’s tenure will be, but already he looks a hell of a lot better than Ballmer, an unadulterated moron who drove a company that was on top of the world straight into the ground.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/VK-Singh-sparks-row-with-dog-remark-on-dalit-deaths-apologizes/articleshow/49499097.cms
Untouchables in India are treated far worse than any group is treated today in the U.S.
Btw, everyone here is assuming Chetty is a brahmin, which is another example of HBD prejudices leading you astray. A simple google search could have prevented this error:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=chetty+surname+casteReplies: @greysquirrell, @Reg Cæsar, @Numinous, @Clyde
It’s funny you should say this because I was thinking along the same lines — virtually all of the Indians I know of in prominent academic positions seem to engage in bullshit when they deviate from carefully constricted questions in their domain. And it seems not so much like it’s that they’re just indulging themselves — it’s almost as if they just can’t think the way other intelligent people think. It’s as if there’s some kind of screw loose. They don’t seem to be able to proceed carefully from one proposition to the next, so their thinking just turns to garbage. And, oddly, this can be combined with extraordinary technical talent. I suppose Ramanujan was the archetype of this phenomenon. One thing that was odd about Ramanujan was that there seems to be no other tremendously talented mathematician who was afflicted as he was with an inability to reason carefully about his own results. Certainly I haven’t heard of such a person.
Maybe for too many centuries of evolution, the high castes in India were selected for mystical inclinations?
People are commenting as if Chetty is just some foreigner who recently arrived and has no real concept of what America is like.
But apparently he moved here at age 9. He’s had all the time he might ever need to catch on, one would think. His intellectual limitations would appear to be more inherent.
This man’s name invades – for me his name prompts an earworm:
Chetty Chetty Bang Bang…
…and his Handy-Dandy Blueprint For “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” by Forced Imposition of Section 8.
But apparently he moved here at age 9. He's had all the time he might ever need to catch on, one would think. His intellectual limitations would appear to be more inherent.Replies: @Steve Sailer
The more interesting question is not Chetty’s failings, but the lack of anybody besides me pointing out the problems with his methodology over the last 28 months.
Chetty has improved his methodology somewhat over that period, so if he came under more criticism, he might improve more. Like I say, criticism makes you better. But virtually nobody has noticed what the failings of his project are, even though some of them could be fixed.
Consider he’s using a giant amount of your 1040 form data that nobody else has apparently ever been given access to before, this isn’t just some private project, it’s more or less of a national undertaking, so there should be more high end discussion of what he’s doing right and what he’s doing wrong with your tax data. If he were a baseball statistics analyst, there’d be fervent debate over his approach, but because he’s focusing on how best to social re-engineer the country, nobody seems to find his study very interesting other than to praise it.
A) To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, The data is the message. What the numbers actually reveal or conceal is unimportant, because:
B) Chetty would have come up with an easy-to-understand, progressive, quick-fix whatever. He has effectively admitted this.
I’m baffled.
“His solution? Help the children and their families move to better neighborhoods.”
Unless I’m missing something, isn’t a good neighborhood basically an expensive neighborhood? So if you move people from a bad (i.e. a poor) neighborhood to a good (i.e. rich) neighborhood, wouldn’t the good neighborhood become bad, and the bad neighborhood stay bad? And how do you do that in a free-market economy?
More broadly, the mentality and the philosophy behind this study are revealing. It’s the alchemist’s quest again, the search for the philosopher’s stone, the attempt to discover the magic pill that will heal all ills. The dream of getting something for nothing.
To truly solve the problem of grave poverty, a modern capitalist society has to convince the guys at the top to pay decent wages; and the guys at the bottom to acquire good manners, at least some skills, and at least some discipline. But that would require real effort and facing up to tough truths.
"His solution? Help the children and their families move to better neighborhoods."
Unless I'm missing something, isn't a good neighborhood basically an expensive neighborhood? So if you move people from a bad (i.e. a poor) neighborhood to a good (i.e. rich) neighborhood, wouldn't the good neighborhood become bad, and the bad neighborhood stay bad? And how do you do that in a free-market economy?
More broadly, the mentality and the philosophy behind this study are revealing. It's the alchemist's quest again, the search for the philosopher's stone, the attempt to discover the magic pill that will heal all ills. The dream of getting something for nothing.
To truly solve the problem of grave poverty, a modern capitalist society has to convince the guys at the top to pay decent wages; and the guys at the bottom to acquire good manners, at least some skills, and at least some discipline. But that would require real effort and facing up to tough truths.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @The Last Real Calvinist
People pay a lot of money to raise their kids in expensive neighborhoods, so presumably there is some benefit. For example, on one of Chetty’s metrics, the best county was DuPage in Illinois, west of O’Hare Airport. I, personally, spent a lot of time in the late 1980s and 1990s looking at houses in DuPage County.
On the other hand, I think DuPage’s sky-high ranking on Chetty’s metric was mostly a fluke of the business cycle. Tellingly, Kane and McHenry Counties, which are to DuPage as Dupage is to Cook County did extremely bad on Chetty’s analysis. Why? Is there some radical cultural or policy difference between suburban and exurban Chicago? Nah, it’s mostly because DuPage was a fully built-out suburb by 2008, so it didn’t get hit hard by the housing collapse. In contrast, Kane and McHenry Counties got blasted by the collapse of housing construction because that made up a big part of their economies.
In other words, a profoundly stupid idea.
It has been going on for a long time via Section 8. And the Obama administration is ramping it up:
HUD now is in the midst of a pilot project in Dallas that encourages families to move to higher-mobility parts of the Dallas metropolitan area – more racially integrated places where there are better schools and fewer one-parent families. Voucher payments are higher for such neighborhoods to cover higher rents. HUD officials want to expand the program to other metropolitan areas where it could include as many as 400,000 people.
WAR ON SUBURBS: OBAMA, JULIAN CASTRO REV UP AFFIRMATIVE ACTION HOUSING
Of course all of this is a tacit admission that the “diversity” is beneficial meme is a gigantic fraud.
I can already see his commuting assumptions are less than optimal. His buckets are too big if his goal is serious policy implementations. But it probably isn’t.
Possibly, but it is also possible that the rigidization of the caste system in India meant that eventually the Brahmins weren’t “under siege” i.e., their social standing was not threatened by the upwardly mobile. Culturally this does not lend to much of a “do-or-die” mindset.
Raj Chetty believes in the forces of voodoo and osmosis to ‘magically’ effect change.
Isn’t it true that:
A) To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, The data is the message. What the numbers actually reveal or conceal is unimportant, because:
B) Chetty would have come up with an easy-to-understand, progressive, quick-fix whatever. He has effectively admitted this.
"His solution? Help the children and their families move to better neighborhoods."
Unless I'm missing something, isn't a good neighborhood basically an expensive neighborhood? So if you move people from a bad (i.e. a poor) neighborhood to a good (i.e. rich) neighborhood, wouldn't the good neighborhood become bad, and the bad neighborhood stay bad? And how do you do that in a free-market economy?
More broadly, the mentality and the philosophy behind this study are revealing. It's the alchemist's quest again, the search for the philosopher's stone, the attempt to discover the magic pill that will heal all ills. The dream of getting something for nothing.
To truly solve the problem of grave poverty, a modern capitalist society has to convince the guys at the top to pay decent wages; and the guys at the bottom to acquire good manners, at least some skills, and at least some discipline. But that would require real effort and facing up to tough truths.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @The Last Real Calvinist
You’re not missing anything. Chetty is just another social scientist; if you’re in a social sciences field, you see this move all the time.
In this case, a ‘good neighborhood’ is just a variable in an equation; it is a quanitity; it is a condition; it is a collective — what it is most very much explicitly not is a group of individuals that will be inevitably and irrevocably altered by a change in its composition.
Once Chetty makes this rather tacky little reductionistic move, then all sorts of assumptions and manipulations can follow with ease.
Similar social scientific sleight-of-hand underlies vast swathes of ‘research’ in education, sociology, political science, and on and on.
The lay reader must be very very careful in evaluating the methodology and basis behind most research papers in social science, in particular economics papers.
The point is that most studies seem to biased so that they give the result the author wants the world to see - in accordance with his political viewpoint - rather than an objective view of the world as it is.
I think an even more simple absurdity is being alluded to here: How can we get everyone into the top 20%? Surely everyone is equally deserving?
But a “good neighborhood” is something that non-social scientists talk about as well. Parents often put a lot of effort into looking for a good neighborhood to raise their families in. The goal of quantifying this concept is not an unworthy one. And Chetty’s latest methodology passes some reality checks: Pine Ridge is indeed a bad neighborhood, Sioux County is a good neighborhood.
But his approach still has several other methodological problems.
For example, as one if its products, I fully agree that Sioux County is a good neighborhood. But when I visit, my friends who still live there and teach in the quite excellent local public schools tell me about the changing environment as Hispanic workers' kids start attending in greater and greater numbers, and more and more teacher time and other school resources must be devoted to second-language teaching and other remediation.
So will the products of today's Sioux County schools exhibit the same USA-leading economic upward mobility as my generation? Not likely.
The question then is how far can that result be degraded before Sioux County is no longer a 'good neighborhood'? What's the number?
This is directly analagous to the question Angela Merkel faces: sure, lots of Turks and Syrians are likely to do better by growing up and working in a 'good neighborhood' such as Germany. But at what point must the door be closed before the magic is used up?
This question simply isn't answered; the positive 'good neighborhood' effects are just assumed to be ongoing, stable, and inexhaustible.Replies: @bomag
In one sense a 'neighborhood' is just an average of land with roads and buildings etc upon it. The ultimate in inertia and non sentience.
In another sense, 'neighborhood' means people, your actual 'neighbors'.
Surely, in these sort of studies, only the second definition makes sense, and trying to attribute magical properties to patches of land is absurd.
Chetty's analysis might be useful for static situations, but using it as a basis for policy changes will undermine its results.
Move Cleveland’s underclass to “high mobility” Salt Lake City and San Jose? Sounds like something either party could get behind to appeal to Ohio’s many swing voters. I can see blue collar Reagan Democrats and the upscale secular bobos in Cleveland’s collar counties both finding Raj Chetty’s ideas intriguing and desiring to subscribe to his newsletter. Because they care very much about Cleveland’s poor and want them to have the best possible opportunities.
Of course! But does Chetty then go on to project the degrading of the positive effects resulting from growing up in such a neighborhood as its constituency is gradually (or, these days, quite suddenly) altered?
For example, as one if its products, I fully agree that Sioux County is a good neighborhood. But when I visit, my friends who still live there and teach in the quite excellent local public schools tell me about the changing environment as Hispanic workers’ kids start attending in greater and greater numbers, and more and more teacher time and other school resources must be devoted to second-language teaching and other remediation.
So will the products of today’s Sioux County schools exhibit the same USA-leading economic upward mobility as my generation? Not likely.
The question then is how far can that result be degraded before Sioux County is no longer a ‘good neighborhood’? What’s the number?
This is directly analagous to the question Angela Merkel faces: sure, lots of Turks and Syrians are likely to do better by growing up and working in a ‘good neighborhood’ such as Germany. But at what point must the door be closed before the magic is used up?
This question simply isn’t answered; the positive ‘good neighborhood’ effects are just assumed to be ongoing, stable, and inexhaustible.
When you connect the islands, diversity goes down.
Not sure if lady doth protest too much. “Yes, my research is going to be used to justify ramming massive social engineering projects down people’s throats, but if I ever used my 1/300,000,000th share of the voting franchise I might get drunk on power and create nefarious schemes.”
He just got off the banana boat and native born Americans with blood and sweat invested here over generations are stupid enough to listen to him? I don’t like the rootless cosmopolitan-ness of upper crust Indian immigrants. We get plenty of the low class (caste) ones these days too, doing the usual immigrant schemes and scams of skimming from their business which just happens to be all or mostly cash. I know a Chinese guy who worked hard here to buy a coin-op laundry in a safe urban area with lots of students.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are now funding development of subdivisions in Lake Wobegon, where the women are beautiful, the men are strong, and the children are above average. Now taking deposits for Cargo Cult Acres.
Untouchables in India are treated far worse than any group is treated today in the U.S.Replies: @Bliss
Untouchables in India have been treated far worse than any group has ever been treated anywhere in the world.
Btw, everyone here is assuming Chetty is a brahmin, which is another example of HBD prejudices leading you astray. A simple google search could have prevented this error:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=chetty+surname+caste
They were soo reviled that they were considered unfit to be slaves because the upper castes did not want to come into contact with them. Slaves primarily came from the Shudra caste though there is no evidence to suggest most Shudras were slaves. Untoucables were soo reviled that even their shadow was not allowed to fall on upper castes.
But ...there is also a lot of denial and lying by the upper castes on their alleged non-contact with untoucables because Dalit/untoucable women were routinely raped by upper caste men. The Jat community which is sort of a middle caste community has a saying "You have not really experienced the land until you have experienced the Dalit women” .
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/opinion/indias-feudal-rapists.htmlReplies: @WhatEvvs
“He has advised Republican and Democrats alike, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama White House. ”
What could possibly be wrong with an economist who appeals to such intellectual heavyweights as Jeb!!!, Hillary and Obama?
One thought that occurred to me is that those three worthies could make substantial contribution to the worthy cause of elevating the downtrodden by taking in several young disadvantaged kids into their own households. Why Ms. Hillary even has two large houses in very good neighborhoods. She could teach those disadvantaged kids some valuable skills, like how to make $300,000 giving a speech. Or how, like Chelsea Clinton, they can find lucrative jobs in broadcasting with no background whatsoever and earn $600,000 a year.
Chetty is not a Brahmin Surname. It is from the trading classes of Tamilnadu in South India.
“In contrast, the greater Charlotte area, which was prospering up through 2008, has been hammered by the subsequent collapse in home-building, furniture-making, and lumbering due to the Housing Bust.”
What do you mean “*was* prospering”? Charlotte continues to prosper, homes continue to be built, and illegal aliens have little trouble finding work in construction. And the decline of the furniture-making industry has probably been rough on Hickory, an hour or so from here, but is an afterthought for Charlotte.
Chetty and others fixate on ‘income’ because that is what income tax data reveals. I note too that to enter the top 20% of Americans by income is only to have an income of around $75,000 per year. A public school teacher or cop will make that in many communities but that doesn’t mean they can afford to live in an affluent county. For that family wealth is more important and a lot of family wealth has to do with when you bought your house. My first house in California cost $36,000. It would fetch 25 times that today. Homes in San Francisco or toney LA addresses might cost 50 times what they did 50 years ago!
It’s not that surprising, I guess. He’s got just enough quant skills to do this type of work and enough interpersonal skills to know what the Great and the Good want to hear.
Absolutely.
The lay reader must be very very careful in evaluating the methodology and basis behind most research papers in social science, in particular economics papers.
The point is that most studies seem to biased so that they give the result the author wants the world to see – in accordance with his political viewpoint – rather than an objective view of the world as it is.
What do you mean by ‘neighborhood’?
In one sense a ‘neighborhood’ is just an average of land with roads and buildings etc upon it. The ultimate in inertia and non sentience.
In another sense, ‘neighborhood’ means people, your actual ‘neighbors’.
Surely, in these sort of studies, only the second definition makes sense, and trying to attribute magical properties to patches of land is absurd.
Microsoft employs very few Americans relative to its income, pays almost no taxes, and if Microsoft goes under it means less of the wrong kind of positive foreign trade: the kind that makes creeps like Gates who contribute to left-wing causes rich.
I would love to see the United States unhorsed in jet engines, MRI machines, semiconductor process equipment and so forth because we need to be forced into developing smokestack industry that hires a lot of people. The extreme high value stuff employs relatively few people, and few people have any emotional connections to jet engines, locomotives, bulldozers, and the like. Seeing American names, and knowing Americans engineered and built the products to which they are attached, on washing machines, cars, etc, is important.
If Microsoft goes under, most home and small business users will wind up going to free software, with or without commercial "dessert toppings" like MacOS X.
Let the Microsoft stockholder learn a good lesson.Replies: @Jean Cocteausten, @bomag
You don’t want America making jet engines? What do you want us to make, wheelbarrows?
What America needs to be unhorsed from is finance, real estate and other non-value-added crap. It’ll be a great day when MIT sends its smartest grads to engineering jobs again instead of hedge funds.
My guess has been that they lack conscience. They have a long evolutionary history of being jam-packed together competing for resources. In an environment like that, playing fair, being too honest, refusing to take advantage, caring about the other guy or society, they don’t work out well.
Hmm, sounds reasonable. It doesn’t lend much of a “my fellow man” mindset, either.
Maybe the results of the aforementioned long evolutionary history predate the rigidization.
Are our rulers that clueless? "Help me, Obi-wan Chetty! You are my only hope!"
His brilliant discovery is to dump poor Negros and Mexicans into white middle class neighborhoods? This is "new" thinking? Busing, school integration, residential integration, quotas, mixed income housing and Section 8 have been around for decades.
Let him take his expertise back to India and solve their problems. He knows their languages, cultures, religions, myths, cuisines, legends, celebrations, histories, songs, liturgies, bereavements, triumphs, and soul.
He doesn't know us. Nor will he ever, even if he dropped everything, threw on a backpack and went on walkabout for 20 years.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @greysquirrell, @jill
I doubt Chetty is Brahmin. Chetty surname is not a Brahmin surname.
They (upper castes) tend to have a huge ego and are quite arrogant, looking down on most Americans as dumb and inferior, especially working class Americans of all races. Unlike Arabs in the Gulf, these Indians are masters at hiding their contempt and arrogance and know how to win the confidence and trust of people.
Raj Chetty is evidently an advocate of magic dirt theory.
The big draw of Chetty’s work is that it provides politically useful credible “scientific” support for a popular and viable political agenda. Confirmation bias.
The work itself seems like lots of data collection, drawing correlations, and then voicing op-ed. Sailer obviously takes the same data and draws very different conclusions and causations.
The idea of government having more power to move blocks of dysfunctional people into nice neighborhoods and ruin them sounds absolutely evil. I’m sure the politicians will need lots of “science” to suppress any resistance or protest.
His conclusions seem merely a paraphrase of the “proximity to Canada” thing.
It’s funny how his cluelessness on race is confused with Spock-like objectivity and truth seeking. But maybe he’s not really so clueless. Maybe he knows how uncomfortable Good People are with acknowledging certain realities and how giving some alternative narrative can make us all feel Good again. And useful.
Then again, I recall Chetty saying he was from Milwaukee during one of his (always very slick and polished) talks. Surely he knows what makes Milwaukee different from Salt Lake, right? Well, even if he spent much of his childhood there, he has not acquired the ineffable familiarity of the US that comes with having minimal roots here. And his wife is just some female version of Raj, so, no, he’s not personally integrated. Right, so I’ll go back to clueless and a “pure scientist“.
I would guess that Chetty Chetty Bang Bang is no better with his numbers than Levitt. If you're going to make too much stock with too few bones, make sure it's to the taste of those in charge.
The tastemakers, if you will.
How about this as a plan for upward mobility, Mr. Chetty?
Step 1. Homework and study for at least 1 hour per day – before TV or videogames
Step 2. Finish high school
Step 3. Don’t have kids until you can support them
Step 4. Get married and stay married until your children are grown
Step 5. Don’t take drugs or drink excessively
Step 6. Go to work everyday unless you are contagious
I wish he would use his analytical prowess to uncover the coefficient weighting of each of those variables in life outcomes. I suspect they are all highly predictive and would result in a model whose Kolmorogov-Smirnov statistic is greater then 0.5, without controlling for race.
Are our rulers that clueless? "Help me, Obi-wan Chetty! You are my only hope!"
His brilliant discovery is to dump poor Negros and Mexicans into white middle class neighborhoods? This is "new" thinking? Busing, school integration, residential integration, quotas, mixed income housing and Section 8 have been around for decades.
Let him take his expertise back to India and solve their problems. He knows their languages, cultures, religions, myths, cuisines, legends, celebrations, histories, songs, liturgies, bereavements, triumphs, and soul.
He doesn't know us. Nor will he ever, even if he dropped everything, threw on a backpack and went on walkabout for 20 years.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @greysquirrell, @jill
You left out the Model Cities Program that ran from 1966 to 1974 that wasted billions to graft and fraud. Most of the money was stolen by the rent seekers and grifters of the so called black leadership.
Mayor Daly pulled something to make for luxury housing. The poor black and hispanics were sent out of Chicago to bring crime and drugs to suburban Illinois.
New York City did the same thing to Albany, N.Y., creating new ghettos, high crime areas and extreme poverty in a city that had no good paying jobs for such a huge influx of new comers.
I always wanted to start a free bus service from Texas and Arizona for all the illegals who crossed over the border and were immediately caught and released by the Border Patrol after being given a summons to appear. The buses would take them directly to Town Hall, Greenwich Connecticut. I just want to see their reaction.
I suspect that the reason for this is that Chetty’s proposed solution (i.e., moving blacks into suburban whitopias) dovetails nicely with our elites’ desires. This just provides scientific cover for their social engineering and real estate schemes.
Okay, I guess it’s going to be up to me to say it.
Raj Chetty is a superstar only because he’s telling important people what they want to hear and not telling them what they don’t want to hear.
The basic flaw of Chetty’s work, other than the detailed methodological weaknesses that Sailer and others pointed out, is that it is based on correlational data. Conclusions based on correlation are only suggestive and are never proven. It’s not just a matter of the right technical analysis: it’s a basic, methodological fact. Using correlations to prove causality is as much an error as trying to use classical cause-and-effect to explain quantum phenomena.
The more sophisticated analyses, such as regression analysis, multivariate analysis, non-linear regression analysis, factor analysis, trend analysis, etc, are simply variants of correlation analysis and absolutely, positively cannot be used to conclude causation.
The Head Start program is a classical example of the futility of using correlational data as proving causality. The strong relationship between a rich preschool class environment and later student achievement was taken to mean that by enriching the preschool class environment of students otherwise predicted to fail, they could be propelled towards success. This assumption has been proven, through the experiment of the Head Start program, to be false.
Correlation effects are at most suggestive, and can be treated as a first step in experimental verification. The problem with instituting widespread government programs based on correlational findings is that the program gets its own special interest advocates, and that the program may well have harmful or devastating effects. Again, it’s all in the basic methodology.
When government develops a large program to advance “society”, you block off alternative pathways. For example, the path to advancement in Chinese society used to be doing well in written exams on Confucian philosophy, which clearly did not select for entrepreneurship, creative thinking, or creative mathematics.
It’s not necessarily disastrous to initiate a small-scale, experimental trial, like the subsidy of lower-class infiltration of upper-class neighborhoods in Dallas. It’s probably futile, and destructive of the infiltrated neighborhoods, but if it’s treated as an experiment, it’s effects will be limited in time and space, once the failure is seen. What Chetty and the Obama administration are doing is developing widespread, permanent programs based on unproven and unverified data. Of course, both Democratic and Republican administrations have been doing that since the LBJ Presidency.
Btw, everyone here is assuming Chetty is a brahmin, which is another example of HBD prejudices leading you astray. A simple google search could have prevented this error:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=chetty+surname+casteReplies: @greysquirrell, @Reg Cæsar, @Numinous, @Clyde
Agree with you 100% Bliss , on Untoucables being treated the worst anywhere .
They were soo reviled that they were considered unfit to be slaves because the upper castes did not want to come into contact with them. Slaves primarily came from the Shudra caste though there is no evidence to suggest most Shudras were slaves. Untoucables were soo reviled that even their shadow was not allowed to fall on upper castes.
But …there is also a lot of denial and lying by the upper castes on their alleged non-contact with untoucables because Dalit/untoucable women were routinely raped by upper caste men. The Jat community which is sort of a middle caste community has a saying “You have not really experienced the land until you have experienced the Dalit women” .
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/opinion/indias-feudal-rapists.html
Brahmin Priest on Untouchability:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM85zVt6xCU
go to 4:00 and see the guy introduce himself. He is the chief priest of the Tulsi Manas Temple. The site is very old and holy, but the temple is new, funded by the Birla family. I can't figure out what varna the Birla's belong to. Their history looks like Kshatryia, but it's a trader caste so I guess they are Vaishya.
I don't tell Indians what to do with their country, but it galls me when privileged castes emigrate to the US and suddenly they claim discrimination.
Raj Chetty is a superstar only because he's telling important people what they want to hear and not telling them what they don't want to hear.Replies: @greysquirrell
He’s probably also a ‘superstar’ because he is Brown ; both parties want to project an image of diversity. The Dems under Obama has especially been quite beneficial to Indians, appointing many of them to high positions. Republicans fawn over Jindal and Nikki ‘Nimrata’ Haley .
Perhaps it is the Western stereotype of the Indian Guru that helps facilitate this gullibility. Cultural misconceptions aside, it is quite easy for smooth talking owners of scientific credentials to completely snow others by telling them what they want to hear and selling them solutions that they do not have the ability to evaluate. Most people, even those at the highest leadership levels, simply have next to no understanding of technological issues. In my career as an engineer, I have seen this over and over again. It can be hard to disabuse people of the bullshit they bought when that bullshit is exactly what they want.
So the solution is to identify all the nice whitetopias and move everybody else there. They must have some sort of white magic that the others will benefit from just by osmosis.. But what happens when the whiteopias become increasingly shrinking islands located just here and there? Will the white magic still work? How much will this government program to move people around end up costing us? I thought Operation Head Start and Midnight Basketball were supposed to take care of all this.
Microsoft employs very few Americans relative to its income, pays almost no taxes, and if Microsoft goes under it means less of the wrong kind of positive foreign trade: the kind that makes creeps like Gates who contribute to left-wing causes rich.
I would love to see the United States unhorsed in jet engines, MRI machines, semiconductor process equipment and so forth because we need to be forced into developing smokestack industry that hires a lot of people. The extreme high value stuff employs relatively few people, and few people have any emotional connections to jet engines, locomotives, bulldozers, and the like. Seeing American names, and knowing Americans engineered and built the products to which they are attached, on washing machines, cars, etc, is important.
If Microsoft goes under, most home and small business users will wind up going to free software, with or without commercial "dessert toppings" like MacOS X.
Let the Microsoft stockholder learn a good lesson.Replies: @Jean Cocteausten, @bomag
we need to be forced into developing smokestack industry that hires a lot of people
Probably not going to happen in this environment. Too much EPA, and it is cheaper to ship it in.
Service economy uber alles, baby.
For example, as one if its products, I fully agree that Sioux County is a good neighborhood. But when I visit, my friends who still live there and teach in the quite excellent local public schools tell me about the changing environment as Hispanic workers' kids start attending in greater and greater numbers, and more and more teacher time and other school resources must be devoted to second-language teaching and other remediation.
So will the products of today's Sioux County schools exhibit the same USA-leading economic upward mobility as my generation? Not likely.
The question then is how far can that result be degraded before Sioux County is no longer a 'good neighborhood'? What's the number?
This is directly analagous to the question Angela Merkel faces: sure, lots of Turks and Syrians are likely to do better by growing up and working in a 'good neighborhood' such as Germany. But at what point must the door be closed before the magic is used up?
This question simply isn't answered; the positive 'good neighborhood' effects are just assumed to be ongoing, stable, and inexhaustible.Replies: @bomag
This was the first point that struck me: how long can this last, this shipping of people from MLK village to Penobscot village? If we never “fix” MLK village, it will just be an exporter of its lifestyle ™, just a chronic exporter until it completely colonizes its neighbors.
When you connect the islands, diversity goes down.
HUD’s program may work if poor black people are sparsely settled among middle class white people. Hopefully they would then adopt bourgeois values such as education, thriftiness, and restraint.
However HUD seems to be view a neighborhood as purely a geographic commodity. As if because of racism, black people were given the bad neighborhoods and white people were given the good neighborhoods. The idea is to redistribute the good neighborhoods to black people.
What makes the schools good?
Safety?
Where does safety come from?
From the dirt?
What isn't known is the stealth immigration of Dalits (bottom caste Indians) and their myriad contributions to betterment of life in the US. It isn't known because there has been about zero chance of a Dalit migrating. However, all is not lost, because at least in the US, a Dalit could have slightly more than the ghost of a chance of advancing that would be faced in India.Replies: @WhatEvvs
Thank you and celt darnell for bringing up the caste issue here.
I had no idea about the importance of caste in India until fairly recently, but I’ve been catching up. In short, caste is everything in India, and we are importing it into the US. The Dalit leader Dr. Ambedkar wrote: “Annihilation of Caste”: …turn in any direction you like, Caste is the monster that crosses your path. You cannot have political reform, you cannot have economic reform, unless you kill this monster…
He also wrote that if/when Indians emigrated to other countries in large numbers they would export their caste hatreds, an observation that was prophetic, as he wrote Annihilation of Caste in the 1930s (I believe).
Chetty is a member of a vaishya caste, the Chettiyars. There is no such thing as an Indian-American. Mr. Sailer: any time you analyze an “Indian-American” economist, locate their caste.
I’ve heard of some Dalit emigration to the US/UK. I believe that quite a lot of Sikhs are actually originally Dalits, but they lie about it. Sikhism isn’t supposed to practice caste, but being India, they do.
Btw, everyone here is assuming Chetty is a brahmin, which is another example of HBD prejudices leading you astray. A simple google search could have prevented this error:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=chetty+surname+casteReplies: @greysquirrell, @Reg Cæsar, @Numinous, @Clyde
Chetty can’t be a Brahmin, because he holds a job. But as an academic in he US, he can parade and pontificate like one.
Btw, everyone here is assuming Chetty is a brahmin, which is another example of HBD prejudices leading you astray. A simple google search could have prevented this error:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=chetty+surname+casteReplies: @greysquirrell, @Reg Cæsar, @Numinous, @Clyde
Really? Worse than chattel slaves?
What does that mean?
Btw, everyone here is assuming Chetty is a brahmin, which is another example of HBD prejudices leading you astray. A simple google search could have prevented this error:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=chetty+surname+casteReplies: @greysquirrell, @Reg Cæsar, @Numinous, @Clyde
I was assuming he was from Hollywood and starred in “Chetty Chetty Bang Bang”.
This was the whole ideas behind school busing years ago. Just put the poor kids in with the middle class and Voila everyone’s better. It makes about as much sense as putting a teaspoon of dirt on top of a bowl of ice cream and hoping the ice cream will make the dirt taste better.
These encomiums sound suspiciously similar to to those heaped upon another pop economist, Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame.
I would guess that Chetty Chetty Bang Bang is no better with his numbers than Levitt. If you’re going to make too much stock with too few bones, make sure it’s to the taste of those in charge.
The tastemakers, if you will.
Not possible.
You cannot track my parents’ income vs. my income and where I grew up and where I live now without knowing who I am. If you know my SSN, you know who I am.
However HUD seems to be view a neighborhood as purely a geographic commodity. As if because of racism, black people were given the bad neighborhoods and white people were given the good neighborhoods. The idea is to redistribute the good neighborhoods to black people.Replies: @Blair, @Ed
What makes the neighborhoods good?
What makes the schools good?
Safety?
Where does safety come from?
From the dirt?
agree
You cannot track my parents' income vs. my income and where I grew up and where I live now without knowing who I am. If you know my SSN, you know who I am.Replies: @Numinous
SSNs can be pseudonymized (a unique number is generated from your SSN, but your SSN cannot be back-derived from that number) before info associated with them (like tax returns) are released to researchers. To mine data, SSNs just need to be unique numbers; real values need not be known for the kind of research Chetty seems to be doing.
What do Brahmins have to be haughty about though? They’ve been conquered by Muslims by a few Brits. On the business front they’ve been out performed by a small Persian group, the Parsis. They exerted little influence in the wider of Asia unlike the Chinese.
I mean they seem to be haughty for no discernible reason.
However HUD seems to be view a neighborhood as purely a geographic commodity. As if because of racism, black people were given the bad neighborhoods and white people were given the good neighborhoods. The idea is to redistribute the good neighborhoods to black people.Replies: @Blair, @Ed
This has already been done with the Moving to Opportunity program. In fact the program was deemed a failure it’s Chetty that has resurrected it again. More recently we have Katrina evacuees in various farming and white areas around the country. The WaPo ran a story on one family that moved to a small town in Nebraska. The parents seemed to have not improved but atleast one kid is doing well. Of course she wants little to do with her parents but I guess that’s the price of success.
I don’t agree. The person, not just the number, must be identified in order to connect him to his children. I feel this is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. We are told that our information is confidential, but then it is released to a private individual at a private institution. I am not seeing how this is legal.
Somone posted a link to steve’s post on a popular econ discussion board and this was one of the replies:
In the early version, they discuss the association with percent black
and then suggest segregation as a causal mechanism (though without
acknowledging that segregation has selectively deleterious effects on
blacks) and substitute segregation for race in their specifications,
and avoid talking about race subsequently, even though segregation had
a weaker association than percent black itself. Similarly, early
versions used family structure as an explanatory variable without
acknowledging that this could also be a proxy for race.
At a descriptive level, this isn’t so bad- the whole point is to throw
out different explanations and see what fits- but since they now
propose an expansion of Moving to Opportunity-style selective
incentives, understanding the causal mechanism whereby Iowa is
“better” than Charlotte or Atlanta is very important. And given the
incredible explanatory power of race in their dataset, they should
probably put off making policy recommendations until they convince SSA
to share race with them or use any of the various longitudinal data
sets which can provide (an admittedly more granular) picture of
mobility within race to form an argument that supports what they are
finding with the IRS data.
In the early version, they discuss the association with percent black
and then suggest segregation as a causal mechanism (though without
acknowledging that segregation has selectively deleterious effects on
blacks) and substitute segregation for race in their specifications,
and avoid talking about race subsequently, even though segregation had
a weaker association than percent black itself. Similarly, early
versions used family structure as an explanatory variable without
acknowledging that this could also be a proxy for race.
At a descriptive level, this isn't so bad- the whole point is to throw
out different explanations and see what fits- but since they now
propose an expansion of Moving to Opportunity-style selective
incentives, understanding the causal mechanism whereby Iowa is
"better" than Charlotte or Atlanta is very important. And given the
incredible explanatory power of race in their dataset, they should
probably put off making policy recommendations until they convince SSA
to share race with them or use any of the various longitudinal data
sets which can provide (an admittedly more granular) picture of
mobility within race to form an argument that supports what they are
finding with the IRS data.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Thanks.
I don’t think they can get to race at the individual level through IRS data. I assume that the IRS is giving them made-up identifiers tied to Social Security Numbers because the SSA doesn’t have race.
Update: I’m wrong: the SSA does collect race for each SSN, although in a sloppy fashion:
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v62n4/v62n4p9.pdf
“But the real problem is that nobody seems to have told them that they ought to study up online about the places they’ve identified as high or low on their various metrics.”
It cracks me up that one of his best places for upwards mobility is Big Bend.
Statistics are good, and all that, but sometimes they can be meaningless. Maybe they don’t mean much if things change faster than your measurement and analysis cycle. And what happens if you are trying to monitor a process that never does the same thing twice?
Where’s Yogi Berra, can he tell a lot by just looking?
*And some have both, I know.
Well there are lots of misconception about ‘Untouchables’ in the letters. Hope this clarifies.
1. They are not traditionally considered of the Shudra Classes. They are at times called ‘Panchamas’ i.e the fifth segment.
2. The major conflict of the Untouchables is with Shudras or ‘Other Backward classes’ as they are called. The OBCs hold the land and they have all the power in Indian rural scene. Majority of the Hindu Chief Ministers are of OBC, including the Indian Prime Minister.
3. Practising untouchability is a punishable offence is is used quite strictly.
4. A constitutional guaranteed positive discrimination or reservation of 23% is provided for the Untouchables in Education and Jobs. For this purpose they are called ‘Scheduled Castes’ and ‘Scheduled Tribes’. These castes are listed in a separate schedule in the Indian constitution for safe guarding these benefits. In many states they are promoted out of turn in Government jobs.
5. All education for SC/ST is free of fees at all levels.
6. Seats in Parliament and state legislatures are reserved for SC/ST.
7. The biggest state in India, Uttarpradesh had a Chief minister (Mayavati) from this class.
8.A president of India (K.R.Narayanan) was from this class.
Just google Dalit + woman + rape and see what you get.
Hinduism doesn't exist as Christianity, Islam and Judaism exist. It's not really a belief system. It's just caste - the three upper castes. The word Hindu was first used by the Muslim conquerors, who used it to define anyone in the subcontinent who wasn't a Muslim or an animist. Ambedkar correctly said that the Shudras and the Untouchables shouldn't even be considered "Hindus" - he and Gandhi were bitterly opposed on the subject.
Google Poona Pact + Ambedkar.
1. They are not traditionally considered of the Shudra Classes. They are at times called 'Panchamas' i.e the fifth segment.
2. The major conflict of the Untouchables is with Shudras or 'Other Backward classes' as they are called. The OBCs hold the land and they have all the power in Indian rural scene. Majority of the Hindu Chief Ministers are of OBC, including the Indian Prime Minister.
3. Practising untouchability is a punishable offence is is used quite strictly.
4. A constitutional guaranteed positive discrimination or reservation of 23% is provided for the Untouchables in Education and Jobs. For this purpose they are called 'Scheduled Castes' and 'Scheduled Tribes'. These castes are listed in a separate schedule in the Indian constitution for safe guarding these benefits. In many states they are promoted out of turn in Government jobs.
5. All education for SC/ST is free of fees at all levels.
6. Seats in Parliament and state legislatures are reserved for SC/ST.
7. The biggest state in India, Uttarpradesh had a Chief minister (Mayavati) from this class.
8.A president of India (K.R.Narayanan) was from this class.Replies: @WhatEvvs
Is that the reason Dalit girls (some as young as 6) get stripped naked, raped, and strung up?
Just google Dalit + woman + rape and see what you get.
Hinduism doesn’t exist as Christianity, Islam and Judaism exist. It’s not really a belief system. It’s just caste – the three upper castes. The word Hindu was first used by the Muslim conquerors, who used it to define anyone in the subcontinent who wasn’t a Muslim or an animist. Ambedkar correctly said that the Shudras and the Untouchables shouldn’t even be considered “Hindus” – he and Gandhi were bitterly opposed on the subject.
Google Poona Pact + Ambedkar.
They were soo reviled that they were considered unfit to be slaves because the upper castes did not want to come into contact with them. Slaves primarily came from the Shudra caste though there is no evidence to suggest most Shudras were slaves. Untoucables were soo reviled that even their shadow was not allowed to fall on upper castes.
But ...there is also a lot of denial and lying by the upper castes on their alleged non-contact with untoucables because Dalit/untoucable women were routinely raped by upper caste men. The Jat community which is sort of a middle caste community has a saying "You have not really experienced the land until you have experienced the Dalit women” .
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/opinion/indias-feudal-rapists.htmlReplies: @WhatEvvs
The basic concept about Untouchability is (as the name suggests) is ritual pollution. The Untouchable is polluted, foul, and inherently polluting – because of Karma. You can’t legislate against this.
Brahmin Priest on Untouchability:
go to 4:00 and see the guy introduce himself. He is the chief priest of the Tulsi Manas Temple. The site is very old and holy, but the temple is new, funded by the Birla family. I can’t figure out what varna the Birla’s belong to. Their history looks like Kshatryia, but it’s a trader caste so I guess they are Vaishya.
I don’t tell Indians what to do with their country, but it galls me when privileged castes emigrate to the US and suddenly they claim discrimination.
“Well there are lots of misconception about ‘Untouchables’ in the letters. Hope this clarifies. …
…A constitutional guaranteed positive discrimination or reservation of 23% is provided for the Untouchables in Education and Jobs.
…a separate schedule in the Indian constitution for safe guarding these benefits. In many states they are promoted out of turn in Government jobs.
…All education for SC/ST is free of fees at all levels.
…Seats in Parliament and state legislatures are reserved for SC/ST.”
Sounds like where the US might end up if we keep up AA and open immigration. Wonderful. Not.
I wonder if some “whites” who always harp about their relationship to other whites are all for this because it diminishes the perceived distance between them and other whites?
Raj Chetty is to economics what Neil deGrasse is to science what Ta’neisi Coates is to sociology (or whatever). Why are we being lectured by these half-assed AA minorities?
It cracks me up that one of his best places for upwards mobility is Big Bend.
Statistics are good, and all that, but sometimes they can be meaningless. Maybe they don't mean much if things change faster than your measurement and analysis cycle. And what happens if you are trying to monitor a process that never does the same thing twice?
Where's Yogi Berra, can he tell a lot by just looking?Replies: @WhatEvvs
Yes. Confession, I totally stole this from some commenter on 538: statistically, every adult in the US has one breast and one testicle*. Still, that’s kind of misleading, no?
*And some have both, I know.
From the summary, it looks like Chetty is treating neighborhood quality as an independent variable and income mobility as the dependent variable. That’s only half right. Just as the quality of a neighborhood helps determine a resident’s income mobility, the qualities of the residents help determine the quality of the neighborhood.
Chetty’s analysis might be useful for static situations, but using it as a basis for policy changes will undermine its results.