Analyses of Harvard’s Raj Chetty Mobility Study Elide Key Role of Family Structure. Why?
A tweet by UVA professor Brad Wilcox reveals a glaring omission in a recap and a NYT analysis of Harvard’s Raj Chetty study on Reducing Poverty: “Judging by Chetty’s et al’s own figure, it looks like family structure is one of and perhaps the *strongest* univariate predictors of upward mobility. In multivariate model, it looks like it is 2nd strongest predictor after what Chetty et al call ‘economic connectedness.’”
“In NYT write up it’s all about ‘economic connectedness’(cross-class friendships). Role of family structure is discounted. So, cultivating friendships between rich & poor kids is the *key* takeaway… Guess which factor in Chetty et al gets only glancing treatment in study, even though it its association w economic mobility is strong? Yes, you guessed it, family structure! Pretty masterful effort to elide FS factor…”
Scott Winship, Senior Fellow and Director of Poverty Studies @AEI, says the same thing: “Sleeper finding in the new Chetty social capital paper: once you account for economic connectedness (of lower-SES people to higher-SES people), other predictors of upward mobility seem relatively unimportant--except for childhood single parenthood https://nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04996-4… These are all just cross-place correlations, but family structure keeps showing up in the Chetty papers as looking important. We summarized their evidence on this point in an SCP paper that I wish had gotten more attention.”
