Raj Chetty on Teachers, Social Mobility, and How to Find Answers to Big Questions

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2017

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A high school teacher once told Raj Chetty he’d some day serve on the Federal Reserve Board. At the the time Raj thought the comment was silly, since he was busy working in the laboratory on staining techniques for electron microscopy and was set to become a biomedical scientist. About a decade later, however, and Chetty would become one of the youngest tenured economics professors at Harvard and would soon win both a John Bates Clark medal and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Now at Stanford, he’s one of the most-cited economists in the world.

Raj’s conversation with Tyler spans that well-cited body of work and more, including social mobility, the value-add of kindergarten teachers, why corporations pay dividends, his love of Piano Guys, the most underrated US state, and why okra may have been the secret of his success.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded March 25th, 2017

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Transcript

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0:20.4	ConversationsWithT Tyler.com.
0:26.4	So we have with us today Raj Chetty of Stanford University, and I think of Raj actually as
0:32.2	the single most influential economist in the world today.
0:36.2	And we'll get to why that is.
0:37.6	I'd like to go through a kind of arc of Raj's life and research career.
0:42.5	And as I take it from your last name, am I correct in thinking your family was part of
0:47.2	the Tommel de-Sport, that moved in to New Delhi?
0:51.2	And what's the story behind that?
0:53.8	That's right.
0:54.3	And thanks Tyler for having me.
0:55.3	Pleasure to be here.
0:57.0	So my last name, Chetty, actually is the name of a business cast in India, the Chetty-Rs.
1:03.4	And my family is originally from Tommel Nadu.
1:06.8	And I grew up, I was born in New Delhi, India.
1:08.9	So my parents had actually come to the US and then gone back to India and born in New Delhi
1:15.1	when I was born.
1:16.4	So there's a quotation by your mother in an interview with her.
1:19.2	She's a well-known pulmonologist.
	...

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