My guest today is Harvard economist Raj Chetty, who in my opinion is doing the most important

and transformational research of any social scientist on the planet.

You don't need the incredibly complicated statistical tools or moral pick models that can be

useful in lots of contexts and understanding things, but sometimes you can just show

people simple averages and that can tell a lot of the story.

Welcome to People I mostly admire with Steve Levin.

I first saw Raj Chetty present his work when he was only 23 years old and somehow already

completing his PhD.

He was speaking about his dissertation, which was impossibly ambitious.

It combined cutting edge techniques from both macro and microeconomics and it also tried

to make advances in both economic theory and data analysis.

Academic cocks like these almost always felt disastrously.

It's just hard to do so many things well and economists pride themselves on taking a

part freshly minted PhDs who think they know it all.

The room was packed, standing room on me.

I waited for Raj to get destroyed, but to my amazement, he fended off every criticism.

People loved what he had done.

He was obvious at that moment that Raj Chetty would become a superstar, but I don't think

anyone could have predicted the type of research that would ultimately define Raj and change

the way economists think about the world.

It's one of my few regrets as an economist that you and I have never been able to do a

project together because I just love to observe up close how great economists think.

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