Moving to the American dream? (update)

Summary

Planet Money: "Moving to the American Dream? (Update)" – Detailed Summary

Host: Greg Rosalski, NPR’s Planet Money
Episode Title: Moving to the American Dream? (Update)
Description: Revisiting the quest to make the American Dream a reality through housing policy experiments, examining past studies, recent revelations, and future prospects with leading economists.

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1. Introduction

Greg Rosalski opens the episode by referencing a five-year-old Planet Money episode that delved into the American Dream and the economic ladder's accessibility. He introduces the resurgence of interest in this topic, spurred by new research from Raj Chetty and his team at Harvard. Rosalski sets the stage for a comprehensive update on previous findings and the latest insights into economic mobility in America.

Quote:
"Five years ago we did an episode about the American Dream. What does it take to climb up that economic ladder? And how real is that ladder anyway?"
— Greg Rosalski [00:51]

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2. Revisiting the Original Moving to Opportunity (MTO) Experiment

Karen Duffin, the episode’s narrator, recounts the inception of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment initiated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in 1994. The experiment aimed to test whether relocating low-income families from high-poverty neighborhoods to low-poverty areas could improve their socioeconomic outcomes.

Key Participants:

• Mark Schroeder, an economist at HUD, describing the initial skepticism within HUD regarding the experimental approach.

Implementation:

• Families were randomly assigned to one of three groups:
  1. Control Group: Remained in public housing with no change.
  2. Standard Voucher Group: Received a Section 8 voucher without relocation restrictions.
  3. Experimental Voucher Group: Received a Section 8 voucher contingent on moving to low-poverty neighborhoods (where ≤10% of neighbors are classified as poor).

Notable Quotes:
"Hasn't been an experiment quite like this ever before."
— Mark Schroeder [01:49]

"A big part of the program had always been unlimited choice of neighborhood."
— Mark Schroeder [02:35]

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3. Initial Findings and Their Implications

After five years, the MTO experiment yielded unexpected results. While the primary goal was to assess the impact on long-term economic indicators such as education, employment, and income, the findings were underwhelming in these areas. Surprisingly, significant positive effects were observed in health-related outcomes, including mental and physical health improvements.

Mark Schroeder reflects on the initial results, expressing astonishment at the minimal impact on economic mobility despite improved health metrics.

Notable Quotes:
"Impacts we expected in many ways didn't happen. Impacts that we didn't expect that did happen."
— Mark Schroeder [10:07]

"We did not find any impacts on children's test scores. We did not find any impacts on grownups earnings."
— Mark Schroeder [10:59]

Conclusion at the Time:
The final report suggested that housing alone was insufficient to drive economic mobility, leading to a redirection of research and funding towards other avenues for improving lives.

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4. New Analysis by Nathan Hendren and Raj Chetty

Years later, economists Nathan Hendren and Raj Chetty accessed comprehensive IRS tax records, allowing for a more granular analysis of the MTO participants' long-term outcomes. Their research uncovered that moving to a low-poverty neighborhood did have significant positive economic effects, but primarily for those who moved during childhood, especially before the age of 13.

Key Insights:

• Age Matters: Children who moved before age 13 experienced substantial economic benefits, including higher earnings, increased likelihood of attending college, and lower teen pregnancy rates.
• Data Precision: The extensive IRS data enabled Hendren and Chetty to detect patterns that previous analyses had missed due to data limitations.

Notable Quotes:
"Having that much data allows them to be so much more precise."
— Nathan Hendren [12:21]

"One of the basic findings that's emerged in this research over the past decade is that where you grow up plays an enormous role in shaping your long term outcomes."
— Raj Chetty [22:28]

Implications:
The reanalysis challenged the initial conclusions, suggesting that the MTO experiment did, in fact, support the hypothesis that moving to higher-opportunity neighborhoods can improve economic outcomes, contingent upon the timing of the move during a child's development.

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5. Rebooting the Moving to Opportunity Program

Building on the new findings, Hendren and Chetty spearheaded a reboot of the original MTO program. This new iteration introduces additional support mechanisms to encourage voluntary relocation to high-opportunity areas, addressing the low uptake observed in the original experiment.

Innovations in the Rebooted Program:

• Housing Counselors: Assigned to assist families with logistics such as transportation and security deposits.
• Voluntary Participation: Families retain the freedom to choose their destination, enhancing autonomy compared to the previous mandatory relocation condition.

Pilot in Seattle:
An initial test in Seattle demonstrated promising results, with over half of the assisted families opting to move to neighborhoods with higher economic opportunities.

Notable Quotes:
"It really is possible to change places and make them higher opportunity areas for the kids living there."
— Raj Chetty [25:17]

"It didn't strike me as the most what would have been the most effective going in."
— Housing Counselor [20:45]

Outcomes:
The augmented support significantly increased the likelihood of families moving to advantageous neighborhoods, suggesting that barriers to relocation can be mitigated with proper assistance.

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6. Recent Research Findings: "Changing Opportunity"

Raj Chetty’s latest research, encapsulated in the paper "Changing Opportunity," examines the dynamics of economic mobility across different demographics and regions in the United States.

Scope of the Study:

• Data Set: Analysis of 57 million individuals born between the late 1970s and early 1990s.
• Focus: How the likelihood of moving from low to high-income brackets has evolved over time.

Key Findings:

• Racial Disparities:
  • Black Americans: Improved upward mobility due to increased employment rates in low-income black communities.
  • White Americans: Declining upward mobility as employment rates in low-income white communities have decreased.
• Social Capital:
  • Increased interaction between low and high-income individuals in a community correlates strongly with higher economic mobility.
  • Thriving communities where adults can inspire and provide opportunities significantly influence children's long-term economic outcomes.

Notable Quotes:
"The black white gap in economic mobility has fallen by one third, in part."
— Raj Chetty [24:29]

"If you're growing up in a thriving community where lots of adults can inspire you to pursue a career... that puts you on a very different trajectory..."
— Raj Chetty [24:33]

Implications:
The study underscores the importance of employment and social interactions within communities as critical factors driving economic mobility, suggesting that comprehensive social policies are essential for fostering the American Dream.

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7. Conclusions and Future Directions

The episode concludes by highlighting the transformative potential of informed housing policies backed by robust data. The rebooted MTO program, supported by recent research, offers a renewed sense of hope that strategic interventions can enhance economic mobility for disadvantaged families.

Final Reflections:

• Policy Impact:
  The bipartisan support for replicating successful programs nationwide signifies a pivotal shift in addressing economic inequality.
• Ongoing Research:
  Raj Chetty and his team continue to explore the multifaceted drivers of economic mobility, promising further insights and policy recommendations in the years to come.

Notable Quotes:
"Housing policy can be hopeful. Housing policy, we are sorry we underestimated you."
— Karen Duffin [21:52]

"That's what this most recent study shows, titled Changing Opportunity. It's actually possible to change places and make them higher opportunity areas for the kids living there."
— Raj Chetty [25:17]

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Summary

"Moving to the American Dream? (Update)" intricately weaves the narrative of the MTO experiment's evolution, from its initial inconclusive findings to the groundbreaking revelations sparked by advanced data analysis. By integrating comprehensive IRS tax data, economists Hendren and Chetty unearthed the nuanced effects of neighborhood relocation on economic mobility, particularly for children. The subsequent revitalization of the MTO program, equipped with supportive measures, has demonstrated a higher success rate in facilitating upward mobility. Complemented by Chetty's broader research on social capital and its influence on economic outcomes, the episode paints a hopeful picture of how targeted housing policies can indeed make the American Dream attainable for more Americans.

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Key Takeaways:

• Timing of Relocation Matters: Moving during childhood, especially before age 13, is crucial for reaping economic benefits.
• Support Systems Enhance Success: Housing counselors and logistical support significantly increase the likelihood of successful relocation to high-opportunity areas.
• Social Capital is Fundamental: Interaction between low and high-income individuals within a community is a strong predictor of economic mobility.
• Policy Implications: Informed and supportive housing policies can play a pivotal role in enhancing the American Dream's accessibility.

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Credits:
Produced by Aviva de Kornfeld, Edited by Bryant Urstadt
This Update was produced by Sean Saldana and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez.
Executive Producer: Alex Goldmark
Host: Amanda Aronczyk
NPR

Transcript

[Advertisement Speaker]

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[Greg Rosalski]

We want to hear your questions. Now that the election is over and there will be a second Trump presidency, we want to know what would you like us to cover? Do you have questions about tariffs or immigration or presidential control of the Federal Reserve? You can email us your questions about the economy to planetmoneypr.org or tag us on social media. Thanks. Here's the episode.

[Karen Duffin]

This is Planet Money from npr.

[Greg Rosalski]

Five years ago we did an episode about the American Dream. What does it take to climb up that economic ladder? And how real is that ladder anyway? Well, since then, there's been kind of an explosion in answers to those questions led by work from Raj Chetty and his team based at Harvard. They've got some new workout just recently. So here's our original episode and then we'll talk with Raj Chetty about the latest insight into the American Dream from 2024. Here is Karen Duffin. Back in 2019.

[Karen Duffin]

Once Upon a time in a cubicle not so far away, sat a government bureaucrat in his government issued chair preparing for a very big meeting. It was 1994 and Mark Schroeder was an economist at HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And his team in D.C. had just flown in local public housing authorities from five major cities, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los.

[Mark Schroeder]

Angeles and New York.

[Karen Duffin]

The staff gathers in a basement conference room. It's about 30 people. These are people who run what's now known as the Section 8 voucher program, which is a voucher that subsidizes rent for low income families. It's like a monthly payment to a landlord. Families can wait years on waiting lists just to get one. Everyone settles into their chairs, you know, sipping their government brewed coffee, and the meeting starts. They learn that they are about to join a test program, small in the scheme of HUD overall, but a huge change. They're going to start handing out a new kind of voucher to a small group of their tenants. And then HUD is going to run an experiment on them.

[Mark Schroeder]

Hasn't been an experiment quite like this ever before.

[Karen Duffin]

With the old vouchers, people could, at least in theory, move anywhere they wanted. But people who get this new voucher, they are required to use it to move to what HUD calls low poverty neighborhoods. So just a Nicer neighborhood. This is sort of a radical change for hud.

[Mark Schroeder]

A big part of the program had always been unlimited choice of neighborhood.

[Karen Duffin]

Unlimited in theory, at least. But what the majority of tenants have chosen was to use the vouchers to stay in high poverty neighborhoods. For a lot of complicated reasons, including discrimination, landlords often refuse to take Section 8 tenants. So back in the basement at HUD, as this big new idea gets introduced, I imagine people, you know, put down their government brewed coffee and start raising their hands like, why are we doing this? Our job is to move people into housing, period. Now HUD is basically asking them to reverse that, to move people out.

[Mark Schroeder]

I couldn't believe the public housing authorities would go along with inducing turnover among their tenants.

[Karen Duffin]

Mark. And the people running this meeting, they're like, yeah, I know. But now our job is to move people to opportunity. You know, the government spends money across all kinds of programs just trying to improve people's lives, like give them better education or health or increase their income. And the big idea that they want to test is, can we improve all of those things and more all at once just by moving a family somewhere new? But of course, to get the government to give money, you have to prove that it works.

[Mark Schroeder]

If you want to really know whether this works or not, you need an experiment.

[Karen Duffin]

You know, control group, independent variable. We will run an actual, like, scientific experiment and we'll track the data for decades.

[Mark Schroeder]

The only randomized experiment that tests the impact of neighborhood on people's lives.

[Karen Duffin]

Can changing someone's address change their life? The answer to that seems very obvious, but this experiment did not at all go as planned.

[Mark Schroeder]

Almost everything about moving to opportunity has been a surprise, not only to me, but to practically everybody else.

[Karen Duffin]

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Karen Duffin. Today on the show, we are writing a social policy roller coaster alongside the researchers who ran this experiment and the people they tested it on. People who were not always excited to be experimenting. It is a quest to make the American dream a reality. A quest that economists thought failed, but is in the midst of an unexpected revival.

[Ira Glass]

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[Karen Duffin]

Enterprise Ready AI Mark and this tiny band of public housing staff, leave that conference room, go forth from D.C. and start signing up tenants. The way it worked was this. Tenants from the five chosen cities would be assigned by lottery to one of three groups. Like any good experiment, there would be a control group. This group already lives in public housing, and they would stay in public housing. So no change to group one. Group two would get a regular section eight voucher. This is the rent subsidy that they can theoretically use with any landlord who will take it. And group three, this group is the experimental group. They would also get the Section 8 voucher, but they had to use it to move out to a completely different neighborhood, one where just 10% or less of their neighbors were what the government has classified as poor. For context. Most of them had been living in neighborhoods with about 50% poverty. So HUD was asking them to move to what should hopefully be a better neighborhood. But not everyone was excited about that.

[Mark Schroeder]

There were some people who were praying, literally praying, and they would be in the regular voucher group because they did not want to have to find another place that far away, either socially or physically.

[Karen Duffin]

When HUD surveyed families about this, the families said, yes, we do want a voucher, but we want it just because we want to make sure our house is decent and we want to get into a safer neighborhood.

[Mark Schroeder]

Only like number three or four was a better schools for my children, better jobs for me. Those were. Those were way down there.

[Karen Duffin]

For them, housing was just housing, not opportunity.

[Mark Schroeder]

I think they didn't buy into the hypothesis we were testing.

[Karen Duffin]

Was that disappointing?

[Mark Schroeder]

I have to say that I wasn't that surprised. We're asking them to do something that people were not doing.

[Karen Duffin]

The vast majority of people who get vouchers do not use them to move to areas with lower poverty. Also, Mark and his HUD crew were asking people to participate in a science experiment on themselves, asking them to be living test subjects for a theory they have not proven yet, which is an especially hard thing to take from the federal government, a government that has a history of intentional, intentionally segregating people of color into high poverty neighborhoods. The experiment took years to set up, but in the end about 4600 families were part of it. And in 1994, the moving began. We were not able to talk to the families that moved, but NPR's Morning Edition did cover the study. While it was happening. Stevens keep spoke to a mother named Shirley Hudnall, who had moved with her 15 year old son Brian. She talked to him about some of the things that do make these kinds of moves hard.

[Advertisement Speaker]

When Brian moved out of Baltimore, he lost touch with his friends. He was expelled from junior high school for fighting with his new classmates.

[Karen Duffin]

I was like, have I, have I failed or what is really happening? And the thing that I found out that it was him having to adjust, feeling that I was taking something away from him until I really sit down and talk to him, that this was for his betterment. For four years across the five test cities, people like Shirley moved. And the researchers waited. And in 2008 the researchers finished gathering the data and what it told them surprised them.

[Mark Schroeder]

Impacts we expected in many ways didn't happen. Impacts that we didn't expect that did happen.

[Karen Duffin]

For one thing, moving was better for.

[Mark Schroeder]

Girls than for boys, which we certainly did not expect.

[Karen Duffin]

Parents reported better health, something HUD hadn't even originally planned to measure. Improved mental health and physical health.

[Mark Schroeder]

We saw impacts on diabetes, obesity, all.

[Karen Duffin]

Of which of course is wonderful. But this is not what the experiment was designed to test. What they wanted to test was the quote, long term housing, employment and educational achievements of families involved. And this massive scientifically designed and rigorously tested social experiment that had moved thousands of people. Just to answer the question, can changing someone's address change the course of their economic life? The answer to that question was no.

[Mark Schroeder]

We did not find any impacts on children's test scores. We did not find any impacts on grownups earnings.

[Karen Duffin]

Basically no impact on educational outcomes, employment or income if you want to improve those things. The final report said housing is not your answer, housing is just housing. And with that, all of the hopes and dollars and research and programs that had been going towards this idea about housing, a lot of that just got rerouted to other ideas. But then this thing happened. About four years after that final SAD MTO data came out, another researcher badged into his government cubicle, this time on the 10th floor of the IRS headquarters in D.C. and like Mark, he wanted to understand how to improve people's economic lives.

[Advertisement Speaker]

We had been working with data at the irs.

[Karen Duffin]

This is Nathan Hendren, he's an economist from Harvard. And for a few years, he and some of his research pals had been granted access to tax records at the IRS with all kinds of privacy restrictions.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Of course, before this, I was working mainly with survey data sets where if you had, you know, 10,000 people in your data set, you were quite excited. In this data, you know, you're dealing with millions.

[Karen Duffin]

Having that much data allows them to be so much more precise.

[Advertisement Speaker]

And what that allows you to do is really kind of put a sharp knife into your analysis and really uncover patterns.

[Karen Duffin]

Nathan is trying to understand the impact of tax policies on upward mobility, which is economists speak for can you achieve the American dream? Can a child go from the bottom income bracket to, over time, the top income bracket? And this is an issue that has become increasingly urgent. Right now, the data says that you are twice as likely to be able to achieve the American dream in Europe, or at least a lot of countries in Europe. So Nathan is looking at tax records from across the country, and he does start seeing a pattern, a pattern that surprised him. That huge MTO study, it looked like it had missed something, something enormous, actually.

[Advertisement Speaker]

I remember that day vividly after the break.

[Karen Duffin]

The experiment that changed everything has to change.

[Ira Glass]

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[Karen Duffin]

This is Ira Glass of this American Life. Each week on our show, we choose a theme, tell different stories on that theme.

[Advertisement Speaker]

All right, I'm just going to stop right there.

[Mark Schroeder]

You're listening to an NPR podcast.

[Karen Duffin]

Chances are, you know our show. So instead I'm going to tell you we've just been on a run of really good shows lately, some big, epic emotional stories and some weird, funny stuff, too. Download us this American Life. Alexi Horowitz Ghazi here. Sure, subscriptions offer convenience, but are they bad for competition?

[Raj Chetty]

When you're not canceling because you forget about it or it's difficult to cancel, those forces of consumers taking their business to another product are blunted.

[Advertisement Speaker]

That's from our recent Planet Money bonus episode, my extended interview with Stanford economist Neil Mahoney.

[Karen Duffin]

Listen with [e-mail] this message comes from Wondery.

[Ira Glass]

Some of the craziest conspiracy theories are actually classified government operations. To hear more about these hidden truths, listen to Declassified Mysteries with Luke lamanna on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Karen Duffin]

Okay, so Nathan Hendren was knee deep in all of this income tax data at the IRS alongside his researcher pal, Raj Chetty.

[Advertisement Speaker]

So Raj and I were both working away at the Internal Revenue Service.

[Karen Duffin]

They'd seen this data that showed a pattern. People who are rising from the bottom income bracket to the top income bracket aren't just randomly scattered across the country. They're clustered. And your chances of escaping poverty vary widely depending on which cluster you're in. So Nathan digs in deeper. He's starting to look at families who moved into higher mobility neighborhoods.

[Advertisement Speaker]

The longer a child spent in a neighborhood with higher rates of upper mobility, the higher their outcomes were in adulthood.

[Karen Duffin]

Like, let's say you have two kids and you move them to this better neighborhood and one of your kids is four when you move and the other.

[Advertisement Speaker]

One is eight, you'd actually see higher outcomes on average for the four year old relative to the eight year old.

[Karen Duffin]

Where you live matters for whether you have a shot at achieving the American dream, which sounds terribly obvious, but that contradicts what moving to opportunity found. That huge HUD study.

[Advertisement Speaker]

At that point, we were of the mindset of, well, geez, we should probably get the MTO data.

[Karen Duffin]

Nathan starts to map income tax data from the actual MTO participants. And this more precise MTO data confirms the pattern that they saw nationally. In fact, the data is so strong that they can say the new neighborhood actually caused the person's economic improvements. That's how much a change of address mattered. But they also start to realize that it really only mattered for a subset of the MTO participants, only for kids who were younger than 13 years old when they moved. And this explains why HUD missed this outcome. Nathan was looking at the data in 2014. HUD had last looked at this data six years before that in 2008.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Back in 2008, you wouldn't have seen it. There just weren't enough young children into the labor market where you'd really be able to say, ah, it looks like there's an effect here. But wait five years, and all of a sudden you can really start to see these patterns emerge.

[Karen Duffin]

Those younger kids had now grown up, started earning money, started producing income tax data, and they were finally grown up enough now for the data to reveal itself. And what the data was saying was that housing had been hope. Even though they had spent 14 years on this study, they had just counted it out too early. It's so crazy how just by happenstance, kind of, you guys were studying this at a moment where you could actually.

[Advertisement Speaker]

See that, yeah, it's Nice to get lucky sometimes.

[Karen Duffin]

What they found specifically is that kids who move under the age of 13 over time, they earn about 30% more.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Were 4 percentage points more likely to.

[Karen Duffin]

Go to college, teen pregnancies less likely. The data also seems to indicate that these benefits will probably be passed on to their children. This all did come with a caveat. For kids who are moved when they're older than 13, they earn less over time. The move is actually slightly harmful for that group. But when you look at the younger kids, and over time, as they earn more money, they pay more income taxes. And with that, the program actually looks like it pays for itself. So Nathan and his research pals are looking at all of this really exciting data.

[Advertisement Speaker]

You could kind of feel that we had something that was going to change the way people thought about neighborhoods and change the way people thought about inequality of opportunity in the United States.

[Karen Duffin]

They write all this up in a paper, they release it, and then overnight, we were inundated.

[Advertisement Speaker]

We got a lot of emails from people who were eager to think about what we should be doing to use housing policy as a way to think about improving upward mobility for children who are most disadvantaged.

[Karen Duffin]

Huh. Did you get a lot of those emails before this?

[Advertisement Speaker]

No. No, we did not.

[Karen Duffin]

Many of these emails are coming from people who work in public housing who are saying, look, now that we know that this thing works, we should reboot the original HUD program. And Nathan is excited about that prospect. But he does know that if they reboot this, there needs to be an important addition. Because in the original program, you know, way back in the 90s, people who were given vouchers on the condition that they had to move to a better neighborhood, more than half of those people just, like, gave the voucher back. Basically said, I would rather forfeit this than be told where I have to move. So if Nathan wants this to be more than just a nice research paper with nice data about opportunity, someone will need to figure out how to get people to actually move to that opportunity. So Nathan and his team, they start working with cities to basically reboot moving to Opportunity. The original MTO program, it required people who got the special vouchers to move to low poverty areas. But. But in this reboot, families can choose to move wherever they want. What Nathan and his team are trying to test is whether people have not been moving to opportunity because they don't want to, or is it just because they need a little support. So in their first test city in Seattle, one group gets a voucher and the other group gets A voucher, but also support a sort of housing counselor to help navigate things like transportation in the new neighborhood. Even helps cover security deposits. These counselors also work with landlords. Could this simple intervention get people to move voluntarily?

[Advertisement Speaker]

It didn't strike me as the most what would have been the most effective going in.

[Karen Duffin]

But they tried it out in Seattle.

[Advertisement Speaker]

And after a year, more than half of the families end up using the voucher. In a neighborhood that has high upward mobility.

[Karen Duffin]

More than three times the number of people chose to move to an area with higher opportunity when they were given support from a counselor. And all of this data from the original MTO study, this new one was so compelling that the unthinkable happened. Congress recently passed a bipartisan bill giving federal funds to replicate programs like this across the country. Nathan and that team will also be expanding to new cities. And yes, we do now know that housing policy can be hopeful. Housing policy, we are sorry we underestimated you. Thank you for your service. But for now, we can probably only call it a sliver of hope, because the number of families whose lives are improving through this program is really just a tiny drop in a much bigger pool.

[Greg Rosalski]

That is where we left the story back in 2019. And since then, the researchers have been busy. They're known as the Opportunity Insights Team, based at Harvard, and they have put out a steady stream of papers that have made the director, Raj Chetty, into something of an economic rock star. Our own newsletter writer, Greg Rosalski, called him the Beyonce of economics because each new paper is like an album drop. Anyway, before we get to his latest release, we asked Raj Chetty himself to catch us up on the biggest hits or maybe findings since our original episode.

[Raj Chetty]

Yeah, so one of the basic findings that's emerged in this research over the past decade is that where you grow up plays an enormous role in shaping your long term outcomes. And what we've been focused on since identifying that result is trying to figure out why. Is it because of resources available in the area? The quality of schools, the quality of jobs, public transit? Is it about who you're interacting with, who you're influenced by? And what we found in a nutshell, is that social capital, who you're connected to, and in particular the amount of interaction between low and high income people in a given area is one of the strongest predictors of differences in economic mobility.

[Greg Rosalski]

His new paper, called Changing Opportunity, is about how the gap between rich and poor is changing over time. So is it more or less likely that a poor kid will end up rich? So to do this, they looked at data from 57 million people born between the late 1970s and early 1990s.

[Raj Chetty]

We find that in some places, and for some subgroups, black Americans, for example, growing up in low income families, they now have better, slightly better chances of rising up than they did in the past. In many places, white kids growing up in low income families unfortunately have worse chances of rising up than they did in the past. So what is leading to these disparate changes across subgroups, across areas? We looked at many different factors and what we find is that there's one variable that strongly predicts these differences, which is the change in the share of parents who are working in these subgroups in the area in which you grew up.

[Greg Rosalski]

So if you grow up in a community where more of the adults are working, you have more of a shot at rising up. And over time, low income white communities saw steep drops in employment rates compared to black communities.

[Raj Chetty]

The black white gap in economic mobility has fallen by one third, in part.

[Greg Rosalski]

Because poor white communities are falling behind where they used to be.

[Raj Chetty]

It comes back to the influences of social interaction. If you're growing up in a thriving community where lots of adults can inspire you to pursue a career in, you know, engineering or connect you to an internship opportunity, or give you a sense of what kind of college could be good for you, that puts you on a very different trajectory than if you're growing up in a community where all of those things have disappeared.

[Greg Rosalski]

Raj says he was surprised at how fast some places changed in just over a decade or so. Some communities created more opportunity, many low income black communities, for instance. And even if some other ones changed in the wrong direction, the idea that opportunity can change in a given place is hopeful. To him.

[Raj Chetty]

That's what this most recent study shows, titled Changing Opportunity. It's actually possible to change places and make them higher opportunity areas for the kids living there.

[Greg Rosalski]

He says the biggest and most powerful way to find opportunity for a given kid from a poor family is still to move to opportunity. But he's making progress on figuring out what changes opportunity in a given place so you can watch for more studies to drop on that front over the next few years. Now that we know who will be president in 2025, help us make episodes that you want to hear. What questions do you have about a second Trump presidency? Email [e-mail] or message us on social media. We are lanetmoney. Today's episode was originally produced by Aviva de Kornfeld and edited by Bryant Urstadt. This Update was produced by Sean Saldana and it was fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Our executive producer is Alex Goldmark. I'm Amanda Aronczyk. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

[Karen Duffin]

The Code Switch team spent Election Day talking to folks about how the outcome might impact them. It's a time capsule of people's hopes and fears before they knew the results. One way or another, there's a change coming. I wanted to vote for Trump, but I voted for her. Gays for Trump. I cried this morning. I've been crying on and off. I'm terrified. Listen to Code Switch, the podcast about race and identity, from npr. Joe Biden's on his way out. Donald Trump's on his way back. Want to know what's happening as the presidential transition is underway? The NPR Politics podcast has you covered with the latest news and analysis. Listen to the NPR Politics podcast. NPR brings you the updates you need on the day's biggest headlines. The Senate narrowly passed the debt ceiling bill that will prevent the country from.

[Mark Schroeder]

Defaulting on its loans.

[Karen Duffin]

Stories from across the world. Knowing how to forage and to live with the land is integral to unise culture. And down your block from CPR news, this is Colorado Matters and you can find all of that and more in your pocket. Download the NPR app today.