The Gray Area with Sean Illing8 Aug 2019

Can Raj Chetty save the American dream?

I don’t ordinarily find myself scrambling to write down article ideas during these conversations, but almost everything Raj Chetty says is worth a feature unto itself. For instance: - Great Kindergarten teachers generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in future earnings for their students - Solving poverty would increase life expectancy by more — far more — than curing cancer - Public investment focused on children often pays for itself - The American dream is more alive in Canada than in America - Maps of American slavery look eerily like maps of American social mobility — but not for the reason you’d think Chetty is a Harvard economist who has been called “the most influential economist alive today.” He’s considered by his peers to be a shoo-in for the Nobel prize. He specializes in bringing massive amounts of data to bear on the question of social mobility: which communities have it, how they got it, and what we can learn from them. What Chetty says in this conversation could power a decade of American social policy. It probably should. References: Atlantic profile Vox profile Books: Scarcity:The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matt Desmond How to Catch a Heffalump Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(790)

Freud was right about one thing

Sigmund Freud is probably the most famous psychoanalyst. Yet many of his theories have been critiqued or discredited. So is there anything we can still learn from the father of psychoanalysis? In tod...

17 Aug 58min

Why straight dating feels bleak

The internet is rife with chatter about “heteropessimism,” the feeling that gender relations are broken and heterosexual relationships are doomed. But is this just cynical discourse, like a coping mec...

14 Aug 57min

We’re postliterate

What happens when we read less? What does that do to our ability to understand complex ideas, or even think for ourselves?In today’s episode, guest host Jonquilyn Hill speaks with Atlantic staff write...

10 Aug 51min

What does a parent owe their child?

The Gray Area is taking a short break this week — but we’ve got something special for you. We’re dropping an episode from one of our favorite podcasts, Unexplainable. In it, host Noam Hassenfeld and ...

7 Aug 27min

The vanishing pleasures of daily life

Sean talks with writer and philosopher Ian Bogost about his new book The Small Stuff. They discuss what modern life has lost in its pursuit of convenience, efficiency, and optimization. From stick shi...

3 Aug 47min

How Google broke the internet

The internet is changing. For years our primary gateway to the internet has been search engines: we ask a question, a list of websites pops up, and we choose which ones to click on. But we are rapidly...

31 Juli 41min

The illusion of the ‘self’

Sean Illing talks with neuroscientist Gregory Berns, author of The Self Delusion. Berns claims that the idea of a unified, persistent self is a kind of illusion, and that we are better understood as m...

27 Juli 43min

How MAGA is turning on itself

For years, right-wing influencers and politicians have pushed the conservative movement to have more controversial, anti-establishment views. Why are some of those figures now upset about where the mo...

24 Juli 46min