This story first appeared as part of WFAE's EQUALibrium newsletter, exploring race and equity in the Charlotte region. Get the latest news and analysis in your inbox first by signing up here.
Charlotte’s had no shortage of efforts designed to improve people’s economic mobility and give everyone a fair shot at getting ahead: Project Lift. The Mayor’s Racial Equity Initiative. The Housing Trust Fund. Road to Hire. The Charlotte Opportunity Initiative and Leading on Opportunity. The Charlotte Executive Leadership Council.
To name just a few.
Many of these were prompted by the so-called Chetty study, a 2014 research report that ranked Charlotte dead last out of 50 U.S. cities for economic mobility. The study by Harvard economist Raj Chetty used anonymized income tax data over 30 years to measure how millions of children did — or didn’t — rise up the socioeconomic ladder.
Chetty has said it will take decades to measure changes to the rankings. Since the original study tracked children over 30 years as they grew into middle adulthood, we might expect to see a comparable report on how we’ve progressed since then sometime in the mid-2040s. That’s frustrating for local leaders who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars right now and want to know if we’re moving in the right direction (and for politicians who want wins to show voters every two or four years).
Chetty visited Charlotte last week for the annual UNC Charlotte Chancellor’s Speaker Series. He dropped a hint about forthcoming research to be published next year that perked up many ears among the nearly 300 attendees at the DuBois Center uptown.
“One question folks are probably wondering about, a natural thing to ask, is, Has all this made a difference? Where are things headed in Charlotte?” he said. “Early next year, we’ll put out a new study … as kind of a 10-year update of the statistics we put out in 2014.”
“I think you all are going to be encouraged by what you see in that new study,” he said, hinting at a higher ranking and drawing chuckles and applause from the audience.
But Chetty also had a sobering message: Don’t expect quick results. In fact, be prepared to wait, and work, for decades.
“One thing I would caution, again, is people are often looking for impact very quickly. We always find these dosage effects, where it takes years to see the impact really emerge. It’s not like you just flip a switch and suddenly see the impacts emerge. It’s really key to be patient to see the fruits of these kinds of interventions,” he said during the discussion I moderated.
And, a corollary: It’s going to be expensive. Whether you’re talking about rebuilding failing schools and low-income housing projects, or paying for job and skills training, or helping with down payments and housing vouchers, serious programs cost serious money.
“You get what you pay for in this context. I think there’s been a temptation in our field to look for things like nudges, or very low-cost interventions that are going to dramatically change people’s lives,” he said. “There may be a couple cases where you can find something like that.”
And I asked Chetty if people’s desire for quick and cheap fixes is a frustrating part of his work — if he gets tired of people asking for the one thing, that one change, they need to make to just fix economic inequality.
“Look, I would like to find that myself,” he said. “The challenge in this work is, if you define the outcome as economic opportunity and mobility, you’re really going to see the effect only 20 years later, by definition. You’re talking about helping kids when they’re 5 years old, you’re only going to see their income when they’re 25, 30 years old.”
Chetty said his group is working on various predictive metrics that might help address that problem — say, maybe whether kids are forming cross-class friendships, or how the development of certain skills is progressing among toddlers.
“The hope is, we can start to give you a sense, an early sense, of whether your program is headed in the right direction instead of waiting 20 years,” said Chetty. “We don’t quite have that yet, but I think that’s the kind of thing we need.”
