Raj Chetty

Raj Chetty has become a star of the economics world, pinpointing how geography, teacher quality and other factors help or hurt economic mobility. His latest finding, out this year, offers sobering evidence that the deck is still stacked against many Americans when it comes to race. Using anonymous tax returns from 20 million people born between 1978 and 1983, Chetty and three co-authors found that black men earned less income in adulthood than white men who grew up at the same family income level and in the same neighborhood. Black men were also more likely to experience downward mobility. Chetty and his team proposed three reasons for the difference in income mobility: high levels of poverty and a relative lack of father figures among low-income African-Americans, as well as racial bias.

As an economist, Chetty says he always wants his work to inform public policy, and in this case, his findings suggest there can’t be a color-blind approach to solving income inequality: “You have to achieve meaningful racial integration,” he said in an interview. Chetty’s Equality of Opportunity Project—co-founded with fellow economists Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard and John Friedman of Brown—is working with state and local governments, nonprofit organizations and institutions of higher education to address his most recent findings and test possible solutions, like increasing mentorship opportunities for black boys, especially those from low-income neighborhoods. “We didn’t have the data to have enough to say on a fine-grain local level,” Chetty says. “Now we do.”

—Lauren Aratani