(Roughly) Daily

[Raj] Chetty turns 40 this month, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential social scientists of his generation. “The question with Raj,” says Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, one of the country’s leading urban economists, “is not if he will win a Nobel Prize, but when.”

The work that has brought Chetty such fame is an echo of his family’s history. He has pioneered an approach that uses newly available sources of government data to show how American families fare across generations, revealing striking patterns of upward mobility and stagnation. In one early study, he showed that children born in 1940 had a 90 percent chance of earning more than their parents, but for children born four decades later, that chance had fallen to 50 percent, a toss of a coin…

Now he wants to do more than change our understanding of America—he wants to change America itself. His new Harvard-based institute, called Opportunity Insights, is explicitly aimed at applying his findings in cities around the country and demonstrating that social scientists, despite a discouraging track record, are able to fix the problems they articulate in journals. His staff includes an eight-person policy team, which is building partnerships with Charlotte, Seattle, Detroit, Minneapolis, and other cities.

For a man who has done so much to document the country’s failings, Chetty is curiously optimistic. He has the confidence of a scientist: If a phenomenon like upward mobility can be measured with enough precision, then it can be understood; if it can be understood, then it can be manipulated. “The big-picture goal,” Chetty told me, “is to revive the American dream.”…

* Doris Lessing

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As we ponder possibility, we might send imperial birthday greetings to Alexander III of Macedon (or as he’s better known, Alexander the Great); he was born on this date in 356 BC.  After a childhood of tutelage by Aristotle, twenty-year-old Alexander succeeded his father, Philip II, as Basileus (King) of Macedon.  He devoted most of his reign to an unprecedented military campaign through Asia and northeast Africa, and by the age of thirty he had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world, stretching from Greece to northwestern India.  He was undefeated in battle and is widely considered one of history’s most successful military commanders; indeed, military academies still teach his tactics.

At his death he was Basileus of Macedon, Hegemon of the Hellenic League, Shahanshah of Persia, Pharaoh of Egypt, and Lord of Asia.  His legacy includes 20 cities that bear his name (maybe most notably, Alexandria, in Egypt), but more fundamentally, it includes the cultural diffusion and syncretism that his conquests engendered.  For example, Alexander’s settlement of Greek colonists and the resulting spread of Greek culture in the east resulted in a new Hellenistic civilization, aspects of which were still evident in the traditions of the Byzantine Empire in the mid-15th century AD and in the presence of Greek speakers in central and far eastern Anatolia until the 1920s.

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