Nothing Freaky About His Economics
Harvard economist Raj Chettys resume reads like every economists secret fantasy.
Harvard economist Raj Chettys resume reads like every economists secret fantasy a tenured position at the University of California,Berkeley,at 23; the youngest tenured professor in the department of economics at Harvard he took only three years to complete his doctorate after graduation; rated by The Economist as one of the worlds eight best economists at 28; being among the worlds most cited young economists,and now in the list of 23 winners of this years MacArthur Foundations Genius grant,which also went to heavyweights like Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz and paediatric neurosurgeon Benjamin Warf. Chetty,33,who is living the dream,is,however,maddeningly modest about his achievements. The recognition just shows that there is a wider audience and acceptance of the kind of work that I have been doing, he says over the phone from Cambridge,Massachusetts.
Chettys kind of work has never quite followed the tested turf. He has worked on ambitious and far-ranging topics,from unemployment to taxation to the impact of teaching on quality of life,but with an emphasis on hard data. I believe in combining speculation with a quasi-experimental approach. Public policies need to take into account both the talking points and scientific data to be really effective, he says. Most of his research has followed this approach of fine-tuning economic theories behind public policies.
In a study released in 2010,Chetty and his co-authors tracked one million US students from childhood to adulthood and found out that early exposure to a teacher of excellent standard resulted in an enhanced lifetime income,emphasising the need for greater investment in primary education. Earlier,Chetty used a similar approach to calculate the optimal amount and period of unemployment benefits neither so little so that the workers are thrown into acute financial distress,nor so generous that they lose the motivation to look for income. In 2011,he came up with another study on the impact of classroom size on eventual economic success after having studied data of nearly 12,000 primary school students in Tennessee.
In the current economic environment of the US,there are often political implications of Chettys populist research findings. The MacArthur Foundation website describes his work as: By asking simple,penetrating questions and developing rigorous theoretical and empirical tests,Chettys timely,often surprising,findings in applied economics are illuminating key policy issues of our time. His findings have been cited in Washingtons political headquarters,by both the Democrats and the Republicans,with President Barack Obama quoting his work on primary education in the State of the Union address recently. A more mainstream political role for Chetty too might not be out of the question. The man in question,however,sees himself as a pure scientist without a political affiliation. Theres still a lot for me to do in the academic sphere before I can look at a political role. Even then,it would probably not be anything direct. It would more likely be in an advisory capacity with a fixed tenure, he says.
His inspiration in this is his father,VK Chetty,an economics professor with the Boston University,who had been the economic adviser to Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the 1980s. It was a crucial period of transition from socialism to eventual open-market capitalism and my father contributed to policy decisions, says Chetty,who lived in New Delhi till he was nine before the family moved to Milwaukee in the US.
The youngest of three siblings,Chetty says choosing academia as a career was perhaps the easiest decision of his life. His mother Anbukili is a paediatrician and a researcher,and both his elder sisters are into biomedical research. We were a normal family,and I played my share of cricket and,later,basketball when we moved to the US,but there was some undefined emphasis on learning and knowledge. My parents insisted that we always have dinner together as a family,so meal times were full of interesting anecdotes and conversations about each others day at work, he recalls. For a short period,Chetty says,he even considered biomedicine as a career. But I found the idea of spending hours in the laboratory on routine work rather intimidating, he says.
Economics,on the other hand,was always intriguing and he took to it with consummate ease. His prize-winning thesis at Harvard gave him a jump-start and Chetty hasnt looked back since. In 2009,when he decided to return to Harvard,leaving the equally prestigious post at Berkeley his wife Sundari too had got a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute,he had three other offers in hand from Stanford,the University of Chicago and Yale.
In many ways,Chetty considers himself the product of the Wests emphasis on promoting excellence. He narrates how,when the call from the MacArthur Foundation came a fortnight ago,he was having lunch with his mother in downtown Boston. I was surprised and she was delighted. But she was also happy that they had decided to move to the US when the children were quite young. If you are doing good work in the West,its easier to get recognition. Thats because of the massive investment that private companies have made in educational institutions. They provide not only terrific infrastructure,but also strong incentive. Developing nations are doing equally strong work,but its much more competitive and difficult to get the same quality of infrastructure or encouragement, says Chetty,who had won the American Young Economist Award in 2008.
The 500,000 that comes with the five-year MacArthur grant,which does not require the recipient to report the expenses back to the foundation,will go a considerable way in funding what he calls his large-scale projects. One of those include a generational study of economic mobility by ZIP codes to gauge equality of opportunity in the US. Even though his body of work is geared towards American policymaking,Chetty is looking towards developing economies for field work. He has just launched a pilot project in Bangladesh,along with two co-authors,to approach developed methods of raising tax revenues in the country. Taxation is crucial for infrastructure development,but at the same time,it has to factor in the people. From the data we collect,hopefully we should be able to come up with a model suitable for the countries in the region, he says.
Paromita Chakrabarti is Senior Associate Editor at the The Indian... Read More
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