Raj Chetty on COVID's impact on inequality & education

This website is really good. It visualizes unemployment rates by geography and how they’ve changed during COVID. Check out your county. Washington County, UT (where we're headed for a while) UP 9.5%! – SLC down 10% - SF down 23% - Oahu (where we are currently) down 32% :(

Also, below are highlights from an interview with Raj Chetty, the guy behind this. I focused on his comments on inequality of children’s education which I thought were the most interesting…

He’s smart

1. The American Economic Association says Chetty is “arguably the best applied microeconomist of his generation.”

2. Recipient of the MacArthur genius grant and the Clark Medal, often called the second-most prestigious prize in the profession after the Nobel, in 2013.

3. Funded by Zuck and the B&M Gates Foundation to “identify barriers to economic opportunity and develop scalable solutions that will empower people throughout the United States to rise out of poverty and achieve better life outcomes.”

He found

1. The recession has essentially ended for high-income individuals. Meanwhile, the bottom half of American workers represented almost 80% of the jobs still missing.

2. He suggests tying teacher salary + bonus to performance. A 2014 study found that the best teachers can help each student earn an additional $50,000 over their careers, which works out to $1.4 million per homeroom.

3. An analysis of the patents filed by 1.2 million Americans found children of the top 1% are 10 times more likely to be inventors than equally smart kids from other backgrounds. If talented women, minorities, and children from low-income families could invent at the same rate as well-off White men, Chetty and his co-authors estimated, these “lost Einsteins” could quadruple innovation in the U.S.

4. The atlas, which went live in 2018, revealed that moving a child from a neighborhood with below-average mobility to one with above-average mobility could boost his or her lifetime earnings by about $200,000.

5. “We’re going to be stuck trying to go along and accept a fair number of Covid infections and deaths and muddle our way through until finally there’s a vaccine.” This would be especially damaging for disadvantaged groups, children in particular. If schools can’t reopen safely for in-person learning, low-income kids will fall even further behind their peers. The tracker includes one bit of noneconomic data, from Zearn, a nonprofit online math platform, showing overall usage dropped when schools closed in March. Then, however, kids in high-income areas, prodded by well-educated parents who were working from home, started logging on again, completing more lessons in early May than they had before the crisis. By contrast, overall participation on Zearn had dropped almost 30%, and by more than half for children in low-income areas, possibly because they were in households where parents were more likely to be “essential” employees working outside the home. “Public schools were, to some extent, serving to level the playing field and increase social mobility,” Chetty says. With the shift to mostly or only remote learning in many school districts, “you’re going to have massive impacts on inequality.”