It's Monday, December 11th, 2017, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.

I'm Kishore Hari.

Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We never defied out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

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I like to think of myself as the American dream. My father grew up in a small village in India, worked hard in school,

earned scholarships to universities. Succeeding there, he was able to gain entrance to graduate

school in the U.S. He turned that subsequent PhD into a career in industry, eventually

starting a company that employed hundreds in a former

Rust Belt town. And that created a wonderful life for me, not always easy, but comfortable by any

measure. That sense that education, hard work, perseverance has been embedded in my family's

DNA ever since. And you hear every politician going back to

Reagan using the phrase, the American dream, to reference that idea. In 2016, we heard a different

take on the American dream when then candidate Donald Trump extolled that the American dream was dead, that so many were

working harder and longer for so much less. And he was right. Recent economic studies

showed that the prospect of children earning more than their parents has fallen from 90% to 50%

in the last half century. This erosion of the American dream and equality of

opportunity is the focus of this week's guesswork, Raj Chetty. He's a celebrated Stanford economist

focusing on using empirical evidence, often big data, to inform the design of more effective

governmental policies. His latest work is focused

on the causes of inequality and examinations of policies that could lead to change. You can check it

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