From a WSJ profile of Raj Chetty.
High-mobility metro areas have a combination of greater economic and racial integration, better schools and a smaller fraction of single-parent families than lower-mobility areas. Integration is lagging in Atlanta, he said. “The strongest predictors of upward mobility are measures of family structure,” Mr. Chetty said.
His proposal: move poor children to high-mobility communities and remove the impediments to mobility in poor-performing neighborhoods. He now is working with the Obama administration on ways to encourage landlords in higher-opportunity neighborhoods to take in poor families by paying landlords more or guaranteeing rent payment.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
The problem is family structure. The solution is engineering the spatial/income distribution of households. The connection is not there for me.
And if the problem is a need to improve teacher quality, then the solution is not for economists to run regressions on test scores. The solution is to put the power in the hands of people who care about quality and are close to the situation (i.e., parents), not in the hands of teachers’ unions.
Much learning is social so being surrounded by better fellow students can pay off. Interestingly this could even alter family structures by increasing availability of suitable spouses. There is no direct cause and effect but dynamic shifts in equilibrium due to shifts in conditions and it is better to alter what can be easily changed than complain about what cannot.
All those claims sound unbelievable. What’s the evidence?
Improving one kid’s peers is degrading another’s. If you think you can improve outcomes because of endowment A. You don’t know. and B. Figure out how to do it before dragging kids through your good intentions nightmare.
Sacrificing children to failed social experiments is craven and despicable.
No. Students can learn by explaining their understanding to others so mixes are beneficial to both with the proviso that too large a negative shift can indeed be negative when understanding is in such short supply they no longer find it useful to ask. No one really knows what they know until they can explain it, so if all believe they know, they don’t challenge what they know to really learn it.
I think people should start pointing out how elitist it is to keep pushing this idea that “their” kids would be better off if they get to bask in the glow of “our” kids. A truly responsive educational system would provide something totally different for the child of, say, a minority, poor single urban mother than it will for a middle class suburban kid. The idea that the best thing we can do for the first child is put them in a school that is managed in innumerable ways for the second kid, and then relentlessly measure their progress against the kid who the school is managed for, doesn’t seem wise.
Looking at solutions proposed for many different problems, cumulatively over time, it becomes clear that public solutions have nothing to do with the sorts of problems we need to solve, and have everything to do with where we believe rights apply and where we don’t. Richard Dawkins has a line to religious believers something like, “We both agree to be atheists regarding 10,000 gods. There is only one we disagree on.” The same thing applies to progressive social engineering. We all agree that there are 10,000 horrible things that we won’t solve because rights are more important than justice (parents can disown gay children, people can have racist choices in mates, consumers can be prejudiced in their purchases, workers can refuse a job for racist reasons, etc.) Considering the huge number of outright shameful acts we wouldn’t dream of regulating, proposed solutions tell us very little about what problems people think are important, but they tell us everything about who they think we can push around.
The cart comes before the horse in ‘agenda justifying sociology’.
The racial integration policy is one that progressives have advocated for a long time for other reasons. It’s very convenient that some star economist has come along and found a way to show – completely coincidentally – that we need to do the exact same thing “for the poor children.”
In all the chatter on and around the topic of this part of our current social structure, one word we seldom read or hear is – MOTIVATION.
As we look at the actual structure what elements within it at particular age levels of children affected impact their motivations -and – in what ways? Are there differences in how *initial* (the very beginning) motivations are formed in each type of structure? Ya betcha ! Nothing confirms that so much as the formation of motivations of those in dominated by Asian elements in their structures.
Is it possible that we are observing structures where NO motivations are originated initially, and all are formed only on social contacts? Not likely perhaps, but maybe observable in degree.
Does exposure to others of particular motivations formed in structures of different elements transfer anything to those whose possibilities for such formation is limited to structures without those same elements?
We have some experience from cross-racial, ethnic, economic adoptions and nurture.
Perhaps we should look more closely at how initial motivations are formed, and their subsequent impacts rather than constantly looking at what ought to be the cause for the motivations we observe or do not find.
Reminds me of that quote that sociology is the study of what we think the answers ought to be.
It annoys me when the policy implications that some people may draw form a study (moving poor people around, firing teachers, whatever) are presented as findings. Unless I know even less about the study than I think, I am pretty sure that none of the policy proposals Chetty is pimping were treatments in the study, no?
What about this:
Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing (MTO) was a randomized social experiment sponsored by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the 1990s among 4600 low-income families with children living in high-poverty public housing projects. Families who volunteered to participate in the program were randomly assigned to 3 groups. One group received housing vouchers that for one year could only be used in low-poverty areas and counseling to help them find units in those areas. After one year they could use their vouchers anywhere. One group received vouchers that could be used anywhere but no counseling. A third (control) group did not receive vouchers but remained eligible for any other government assistance to which they otherwise would have been entitled. The demonstration was implemented by public housing authorities in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.[1]
And I wonder if there are negative effecting on the “high mobility” area.
I don’t think Chetty’s assumption that some places tend to be better than other places to raise your kids is particularly unrealistic. Many parents put a lot of effort into looking at places to move to that will be good for their children. And I think Chetty’s database is pretty impressive, and some of his findings pass basic credibility tests. For example, he found that the worst county in America to grow up in during the later 1990s in terms of your income as a youngish adult in 2011-12 was Shannon County, South Dakota: i.e., the tragic Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. That’s not at all implausible. The best county was Sioux County, Iowa, which I’d never heard of before, but turns out when I read up on it to be somewhat famous for having more of the good things of Midwestern rural living and fewer of the bad things.
But there are still three big methodological problems in his current analysis. For example, North Central rural counties dominated his findings of good places for working class children’s upward mobility. Some of that is long term, but some of it is due to the huge China-driven boom in farm and mineral prices that now appears to be ending.
If you are interested in an in-depth critique of Chetty’s income mobility study, here’s mine:
http://takimag.com/article/moneyball_for_real_estate_steve_sailer/print#axzz3pec1xDnU
I think they tried this in Atlanta before. It was called busing. Middle income families of all races abandoned the city for decades. It was like The Walking Dead.