Education, Elitism, Economic Opportunity: Raj Chetty, Michael Sandel, Dani Rodrik

my name is Dan Ric I'm the PO director of the reimagining the economy program here at the Kennedy School along with Gordon Hansen and this is a a kind of a new initiative um that where we're um trying to sort of think of new policies for uh creating an inclusive economy and we like to think of ourselves as a program with three different toools rely on three different kinds of of knowledge uh one of them is um rigorous Empirical research based at the local level uh to examine what kind of policie

s work and and what don't um secondly the experiential knowledge of the practitioners and we're bringing a lot of practitioners to learn from them as to what kind of a cross- sectoral um uh programs tend to be more effective and thirdly uh the knowledge of social and political theorists who can uh Enlighten us about different kinds of market economy um and uh broaden our Horizons about what kinds of alternatives are possible for an economy and um uh this is the the second of our annual panels wh

ere we try to bring people for the second time in our own now it's an economist and the political philosopher the first time um our inaugural session actually featured Danielle Allen and Ed Glazer and if you haven't seen that you're interested in the video that's on our website and today we're extremely um lucky to have two Scholars who have done really extraordinary work on um issues that are at the core of our program um and in in in sort of in a in a very different kind of a way um uh R chett

i who is um an economist has done extraordinary creative uh innovative work um very detailed work um highlighting and showing the importance of play and social networks in determining patterns of social Mobility um Michael sandal a political philosopher um who um has done very stimulating and and for us economists often very challenging work um on the importance of uh civic virtue community and uh putting limits on the importance of markets in determining social value so I'm very excited about t

his exchange we're going to go until 4:30 the plan is that I'm going to give uh each of our speakers beginning with Raj five to seven uh minutes to make some introductory comments um Raj will begin with um talking about some of his recent work um on the role of elite colleges uh in in uh in creating privilege and providing access to social Mobility um then Michael will take it from there uh bringing in some of ideas from his new book um that he will talk us a bit and then I'm going to have we're

going to have a kind of in interchange and open it up for questions and discussions so with that R right well thanks so much um thanks so much Denny for uh having us here thank you all for joining it's terrific to be a part of this group and there I think no more important issues that to be discussing than those that are being discussed in the reimagining the economy program a pleasure to be here with Michael to discuss these topics so as an economist it's very difficult for me to talk without

data and slides so I'm going to start by showing you a couple of slides from our recent work to kind of help frame the conversation from my perspective talking about issues of Education meritocracy and Economic Opportunity uh and then get into the discussion so as Denny said you know a lot of the work we've been doing in our research group at Harvard opportunity insights is to use granular data to zoom zoom in to understand the roots of economic uh inequality at a very local level across institu

tions across neighborhoods and so forth but to set the stage I want to start at a much bigger picture level to think about how the American economy is evolving at a broad uh macroeconomic level by talking about the American dream which is of course a multifaceted complex concept that has different meanings to different people but I want to distill it in this first chart here to one key aspect of the American Dream which is that we at least aspire to be a country where through hard work any child

has the chance to move up in the income distribution relative to their parents certainly it was this type of Ideal that Drew my own parents to come to this country and countless other immigrants and so in this first chart here I'm showing some data from a study my colleagues and I did a few years ago where we set about to assess the extent of which America actually lives up to that aspiration by measuring the fraction of children who go on to earn earn more than their parents measuring both kid

s and parents incomes in their mid-30s and adjusting for inflation and looking at that statistic by the year in which the child was born and what you can see is that for kids born in the middle of the last century say back in 1940 for example it was virtually a guarantee that you were going to achieve the American dream of moving up 92% of children born in 1940 went on to earn more than their parents did by our calculations but if you looked at what has happened over time you can see that there'

s been a dramatic fading of the American dream such that for children born in 1980 we're turning 30 around now when we're measuring their incomes as adults it's become essentially a 50-50 shoted coin flip as to whether you're going to achieve the American dream so this trend is of course of great interest to economists like myself because it reflects a fundamental change in the economy that we'd like to understand I would argue it's also fundamental social and political interest because as Micha

el describes in his recent book and many others have discussed these kinds of changes in our economy have led a lot of uh people to express frustration about this being a country where it's no longer easy to get ahead even through hard work and that I think is reflected in a number of recent political outcomes and so forth so motivated by this broad Trend and our research group we interested in understanding what is driving the fading of the American dream and how we can create a more inclusive

economy create greater opportunities for Upward Mobility for everyone going forward today I'm going to focus specifically on one aspect of what we think might be an important driver which is access to higher education I want to be clear that that's by no means the only important driver there are many other factors that play into this from social networks to Neighborhood level factors to Elementary education but higher education is certainly one important domain and so in the context of higher ed

ucation our team has been doing some work trying to understand at a granular level how much colleges in individually and our higher education system as a whole is contributing to economic Mobility so the way we've done that is by using very detailed data from tax records linked to uh records from the Department of Education and other sources that allow us to measure in a precise way every College's contribution to economic mobility and let me just walk you through in this slide what we see in th

at sort of data and why I think it's a very powerful lens to study these issues in a more precise way so in this plot each college in America is represented by a different Dot and we're showing two key Dimensions that determine how much any given colleges College contributes to economic Mobility on the vertical axis is what we're calling the upward Mobility rate that is a statistic that measures among the kids who are from low-income families who attend a given College say from the bottom fifth

of the income distribution what fraction reach the top Fifth and you can see on that Dimension colleges like Harvard instance Stanford and so on highly selective private colleges look terrific the vast majority of students who attend these colleges who come from low-income families end up reaching the upper middle class or well beyond however a College's total contribution to economic Mobility depends not just upon the degree of success of the low-income students who attend that college but also

on the number of low-income students you have to begin with and on that Dimension shown on the x-axis the fraction of students who come from the bottom 20% colleges like Harvard Stanford and Princeton so forth don't look so great only 3% of kids at Harvard Come From The Bottom 20% we give you another statistic that kind of reveals the degree of inequality here you're about 80 times more likely to attend Harvard if you come from the top 1% of the income distribution then the bottom fifth of the

income distribution so these universities while they deliver terrific outcomes are incredibly skewed towards kids from very high income families and thus they just cannot mechanically be contributing a whole lot to social Mobility simply because they don't enroll that many kids from low-income families now on the other side of the spectrum you'll notice that there are lots of dots over here a lot of colleges that do have many low-income students but unfortunately if you look at the outcomes of o

f those at those colleges those kids don't achieve a very high level of upward Mobility even after attending those institutions typically two-year institutions many public community colleges and so forth and so one way to conceptualize the problem we have in America in terms of the contribution of our higher education system as a whole to economic Mobility is that there's a lack of dots in the upper right side it kind of looks empty in the upper right side of this chart we don't have that many c

olleges that both serve many low-income kids and deliver terrific outcomes and so motivated by that reasoning a very natural way to structure from an economist perspective what the issue looks like here and what the research agenda is is how can we figure out how to move these dots to the right and how can we figure out how to move these dots up and so basically we're thinking about those two Dimensions what I want to briefly show you is how in a recent study we released the summer we've made so

me progress in thinking about those issues particularly relevant to where we are today and thinking about that first question of how we can move these dots that are up here to the right so in thinking about that you know the first question you might have is is there really a capacity for institutions like ours to admit a more diverse student body or is it that you know there's so many disparities by the time you apply to college at age 18 kids from higher income families go to better schools liv

e in better neighborhoods have better connections and so on that you know at that point if you have a highly selective institution maybe there's just no capacity to identify more talented low-income kids who would kind of Meet the bar for admissions to Harvard and Thrive at a place like this so to get at that question in our most recent study what we did is took that data on where everyone's going to college and their parents incomes and their own incomes and so forth and Linkedin additional inf

ormation first on the SAT and ACT scores of everyone uh who's been applying to college in the past several years and then data on internal admissions records from many colleges uh Across America and that allows us to draw this chart here which I think is Illuminating on that question of whether institutions like ours can make a difference on this margin whether they're in a position to shift that dot to the right on the previous chart so what we're doing here is plotting your Chan we're calling

an IB plus college so the eight IV League colleges and some peer highly selective private institutions like Stanford Duke MIT and Chicago and we're just saying what are your chances of attending one of these colleges by parent income importantly looking at kids all of whom have exactly the same sat or ACT scores students who scored exactly the 99th percen on one of these entrance exams uh in particular that corresponds to an SAT score of 1510 out of 1600 so take the set of kids who get exactly 1

510 out of 1600 on the SAT ask what are your chances of showing up at one of these top private colleges in the United States turns out the answer if you're from a middle class family is that about 10% of those very high achieving kids as measured by the SAT show up at these colleges whereas if you're from a family in the top 1% that number looks more like 30% % or maybe even 40% at the very top of the income distribution so that starts to suggest that even conditional and academic credentials at

the point that you're applying to college there are enormous differences in your prospects of attending one of these colleges which which you know maybe indicates that there might be something to we could do in terms of identifying more talented kids these kids you know who are doing really well on these standardized tests even for middle-income and low-income families maybe we can get them to attend our colleges at higher rates and that would effectively shift that dot to the right and increas

e Harvard's contribution to economic Mobility now one last step in think about what's happening here so why is there this big uptick on the right so using the detailed internal admissions data we can start to uncover why this is happening in the past people have thought maybe this is about differences in the rate that people apply to different colleges or the rate of matriculation it turns out the core thing is just about who gets in it's just about admissions kids from high- inome families are

much more likely to be admitted to places like Harvard Princeton Etc conditional on having the same SAT scores as kids from lower income families why is that it turns out to be because of three factors legacy admissions athletic recruiting and weight placed on non-academic credentials things like extracurriculars and other kinds of factors that are different from academic qualifications all of which end up being correlated with parental income and give you a significant advantage in admissions s

o just to show you that very quickly we are plotting here here your chances of being admitted to an IV plus College by Legacy status whether your parents went to that same college and you can see that even controlling for test scores if your parents went to one of these IV plus colleges you have a 45% chance of getting in in particular if your parents went to that college and are from the top 1% of the income distribution the Legacy Advantage is actually smaller if your parents are not very rich

and then if you're a non Legacy you're about four times less likely to get in with a 9.4% admissions rate now in understanding this Legacy Advantage people often wonder you know is that you know truly sort of unfair and I'm sure Michael will have more to say about these kinds of issues or is it that maybe you know Legacy students are more qualified on other dimensions that were not able to measure well you know their parents went to institutions like Harvard and Stanford and so forth so they mu

st have been in families where they got a lot of Education Etc and maybe you know they're just more qualified applicants on other dimensions so one way just to show you the power of these kinds of data you can test that explanation is to ask well suppose your parents went to say Harvard if you truly are a more qualified applicant you might think your odds of getting into Stanford or Princeton are higher as well so let's look at admissions decisions at other colleges turns out that's absolutely f

alse you have no higher chance of getting into any of these other IB League colleges if your parents were a legacy at a given college so that starts to cast some doubt on whether that's what's going on so you can do more analyses like this and start to show that you know you could really question whether that Advantage for kids from high- income families makes sense in terms of uh being a meritocracy final Point why does this all matter so by investigating these kinds of issues like who is getti

ng into these institutions I think we can shift those dots to the right in that initial chart that I showed you but you might react by saying that's all well and good but these you know top priv colleges in terms of total numbers they educate a trivial share of the overall number of college students in the US they're just not that big uh less than 1% of students in America attend one of these 12 IV plus colleges so in some sense mechanically you can't have an enormous impact on social Mobility j

ust by addressing problems like this however I want to end here by showing that that doesn't mean that this is isn't a very important issue and I'm going to show you that by turning to this final chart here where in the first row you see that it is indeed correct you know only 8% of students College attendees go to one of these 12 IV plus colleges however these colleges play an incredibly disproportionate role in shaping the leadership of America people in positions of influence so if you look a

t the fraction of people in the top 1% or 0.1% of the income distribution who went to one of these colleges 133% of people in the top 0.1% went to one of these 12 IV plus colleges even though they account for only 8% of college attendees as a whole so in this if you look at Fortune 500 CEOs a disproportionate share come from one of these handful of colleges if you look at people who attend top graduate schools or are winners of prestigious Awards like MacArthur grants remarkable 30% went to one

of these 12 colleges if you look at positions of political leadership it's even more extreme you look at the fraction of senators journalists you know Supreme Court Justices literally off the charts 71% of Supreme Court Justices went to one of these 12 colleges that educate just 8% of college attendees and so we show in the paper that these colleges have a disproportionate effect on getting you to the very upper taale of society there's a big causal effect of attending one of these colleges and

what that means is when put together with the earlier data that I was showing you essentially these colleges you know perhaps inadvertently are perpetuating privilege at the top taking kids from very high income families and channeling them positions of influence that then influence you know and shape our laws change companies Etc having potentially a big impact on everyone else and so that's the sense in which among many other issues I think thinking about how to democratize education in some s

ense can have a big impact on the United States and I hope that among other issues will be uh things we talk about today so over to you [Applause] Michael I'll just pull this back because there people who are now sitting behind us so so they can see a little bit great well I want to say first of all what a what a pleasure it is to be in the company of two of the economists in all of the world whom I great ly admire uh Danny rodri taught me taught all of us those who would listen the Foles of neo

liberal globalization's excesses for 30 40 years and has now been Vindicated and shown to be Clairvoyant about the defects of what he's called hyper globalization and Raj chedy had has in a way Vindicated economics from those who simply go around plugging in paradigms without actually doing fine grained uh in the case of Raj and his team ingenius empirical work of enormous normative significance and so for example we've learned from Raj and his team that despite generous financial aid policies t

here are more students and at IB league universities from the top 1% then from the entire bottom half of the country combined we sort of sensed that but didn't know that until Raj and his team did their work and as as far as higher education being an engine of upward Mobility which is a focus of raja's work and the presentation he's he's shown us actually what percentage of Harvard students come from low-income families bottom Fifth and rise to affluence and the figure is 1.8 which is shocking t

o most of us who are accustomed to thinking of higher education at least as an engine of upward mobility and not only that beyond the ivy league he's shown that of 1,800 colleges and universities public and private SE the figure is about the same 2% only of students ared from low-income backgrounds and rise to the the top fifth as adults that's an astounding corrective to the complacent assumption that many people have that higher education is a powerful engine of upward Mobility so this is rema

rkable research here is my question for Raj the gener first a general question and then two more specific ones the general question is this I thought I was the moderator here well you may still have to moderate us I'm getting worried here is improving Mobility an answer the primary answer to inequality I doubt it but that's one question that I would like to put to Raj now the two more particular questions first why is there such a frenzied competition to get in to win admission to top colleges a

nd universities now it has something to do with the fact surely that the college wage premium has been growing very substantially in recent decades almost doubled in the last few decades so that's a partial explanation but more than that we have cast higher education colleges and universities like this one as Arbiters of opportunity that's the premise of the opportunity project but should colleges and universities be Arbiters of opportunity today it's universities that confer the credentials and

Define the Merit that a market driven meritocratic Society honors and rewards but should it way it isn't that way so much in other countries it's not that way in Germany where there is this frenzied competition to get into this University rather than that it's not that way in Canada there are other countries that are democratic and that have strong economies that don't cast higher education in that kind of role so uh maybe here's the question uh I would begin with about Mobility even if Harvard

and Stanford admissions committees learned as they should learn from what you've shown us and said all right that gives the lie to the complacent thought that if we admit more low and middle income students that'll drag down the academic quality you've shown that's not true and suppose they acted on that insight and let's say got rid of legacy admissions they'd have to get rid of other aspects as the research also shows because getting rid of legacies alone would not get far in this direction i

t might also require and araj talks about athletic preferences but even Legacy in athletic doesn't get a long way because there Remains the advantage the socioeconomic advantage manage embedded in SAT scores so you'd have to think about SAT scores if you really want to make a dent but suppose we could do that and have a reform project that would increase from three or 4% the number of students from the bottom fif both that could be doubled or tripled moving a little bit closer to that upper righ

t quadrant maybe the mobility figure would rise from 1.8% to 3.6% or 5% or seven or eight% still would improved Mobility in that range even begin to be an adequate answer or a significant answer even to people who are worried about wage stagnation working people without a college degree those of us who spend our time in the company of the credential can easily forget the fact that most of our fellow citizens don't have a college a four-year College college degree of any kind more than 60% do not

so even if we could tweak substantially these Mobility figures at Ivy League plus places and Beyond is that really a significant improved Mobility even RIT large would that be a significant answer to the inequality of income and wealth and I would add social recognition and esteem that dve hard yeah please uh Roger go ahead so you know I interpret the question as being sort of so what happens to those who are left behind what happens you know can we take a whole of the economy kind of approach

to this um and also worry about the uh esteem and dignity and and the recognition of those who for whatever reason when even when you fix those problems of social Mobility those are you know the 80% are still not going to be in the top 20% yeah absolutely well first let me thank Michael for engaging so much with economists in this context and his prior work and really pushing the boundaries of our field to engage with these sorts of questions while Beyond would be traditionally do in our discipl

ine so a couple of reactions come to mind so first I think I'm with you that in terms of fixing the problem of mobility in America let me defer for a second the question of whether mobility in and of itself should be what what we focus on or inequality of outcomes we can come back to that but say you're interested in economic Mobility does focusing on these elite private institutions as we've been doing in our recent study you know is that really going to uh contribute so here I want to come bac

k to the point I made at the end that I think it's very important to distinguish between what we call uppertale Mobility your chances of reaching the very top of society versus just going from the bottom fifth to the top fifth overall levels of social Mobility so I absolutely agree with your point that in terms of creating Mobility overall creating more dignity and work helping a large number of folks what we do at the small number of colleges just cannot be that important in the grand scheme of

things it's not going to even if we get the overall Mobility rate up to 4% 5 perc as you were saying you're not going to see a fundamental change in that first picture I put up what fraction of Americans are achieving the American dream in some sense so why are we interested in what happens on these campuses I would argue that um it matters because as I was showing in the very last chart the people who are in positions of influence who I think make decisions that then shape everyone else's live

s like what our laws look like like how companies are run which products are invented which scientific problems are tackled an enormous fraction of those people come from from these institutions and so what we show in our study is if Harvard had a more diverse student body you end up with more diverse leader in America you would have a more diverse body of Supreme Court Justices Senators you know CEOs leading scientists Etc why does that matter there's other research that has shown that people's

backgrounds tremendously influence the types of decisions they make uh in these sorts of positions so for example politicians who happen to have daughters rather than Sons end up voting very differently down the road or there are other nice studies some done by our former students here at Harvard showing that if you you know you have an experiment where you're randomly assigned in a dorm to live with somebody from a lower income family or somebody from a different background and you look at wha

t types of companies people start down the road or what types of patents they have they tend to be focusing on inventing products that cater more to the problems of people from the middle class or lower income backgrounds and so this is the sense in which I think Downstream there could be big impacts in inequality and the types of decisions that are made that do in fact affect many people's lives now that all being said I think Michael's right to emphasize if you think back to that chart with al

l the dots you know really where the action is in terms of directly increasing the impacts of the higher education system on Mobility is to figure out what's going on the right side of that chart or the people who are just not shown on that chart the large fraction of Americans who simply don't go to any college how do we increase opportunities increase incomes possibly increase the Dignity of work uh for that large group of people and here independent of the focus on who gets admitted to to IV

League colleges I think there are lots of things one can do in terms of having more effective educational programs I'll give you one example in the US we tend to take kind of a liberal arts education approach throughout our education system certainly Ed institutions like this but many other institutions across the Spectrum in many other countries like you mentioned Germany for example and many other European countries there's more of a career oriented or vocational sort of approach and increasin

gly there's good evidence that in the United States programs that directly focus on giving people the skills needed to succeed in the modern economy are very effective and putting people on much more positive employment and earnings trajectories to give you one concrete example here in Boston there's a program that was founded called year up which some of you might know it's a sectoral job training program that has been growing very rapidly in recent years and in randomized trials they show that

if you get access to this one-year program which is basically a program that provides you certain set of technical skills connects you with employers looking to hire for exactly those skills and finance technology Etc provide some mentoring and social support and so forth people who get access to this program have a 35% increase in earnings even if they you know didn't go to college came from a disadvantaged background and so forth so I think thinking carefully about those kinds of programs and

making our community colleges more effective in equipping people with the skills needed to succeed in the modern economy overcoming some of the challenges you've discussed Danny in your work uh I think is you know an equally important approach and I think we should be focusing on all of these things not just what's happening on our campus here yeah I I I want to come back a little bit later to some of the the remedies and the policies but for now I want turn ask a question to you Michael um and

taking off from a distinction you make in your book between distributive justice and what you call contributive uh justice and distributive justice is you know the claim that each one of us has on society's resources um and contributive Justice um I'm going to quote is the opportunity to win the social recognition and esteem that go with producing what others need and value can you expand a little bit on the this and because I think it's sort of relevant also to this discussion and it it Bears

on the broader question of the project which is what is an economy for and the traditional answer to that question is an economy is for the sake of consumption Adam Smith said that explicitly so did canes the sole purpose and end of economic activity is consumption and Smith said we should only concern ourselves with productive activities in so far as they bear on opportunities for consumption and in contemporary economics this goes under the banner of consumer welfare um promoting consumer welf

are that's what GDP is a standing for and then we debate how to distribute the fruits of consumption or a GDP contributive Justice suggests that the size and distribution of the national product important though they are are not the only things that matter and uh that's because the purpose of an economy I mean this this is the argument that gives rise to a concern with contributive Justice the purpose of an economy is not only promoting consumer welfare and providing Fair access to the fruits of

consumption it's also to create conditions hospitable to self-government and that requires that we consider two aspects of our identities Visa the economy our role as consumers we want lower prices as consumers but also our role as producers including the condition under which we work and the social recognition and esteem that we receive when through our work we contribute to the economy and to the common good when we meet the needs of others by providing valuable goods and services the the Dee

p divide in our politics that we face today has partly to do I think with five Decades of stagnant wages for middle and lower income workers and Rising inequality of income and wealth but only partly that I think the anger and frustrations that Royal our politics and have prompted the backlash have also to do with the divide the growing divide between winners and losers which is not exactly the same as the income and wealth divide though it's related the added element to The Divide between winne

rs and losers has to do with the attitudes toward success that accompanied the widening inequalities the tendency of those on top to believe that their success is their own doing the measure of their Merit and by implication that those who struggle those Left Behind must deserve their fate too and it's this way of thinking about success that contributes to the sense among many working people that Elites are looking down on them especially credential Elites college educated Elites professional El

ites the kinds of Elites listed in the list of leaders on the slide that Raj showed us and if something like this is a plausible reading of what accounts for the Deep frustrations that fuel the backlash against credential aites I think it's worth being alive to the fact that the complaint is not only about access to consumption and unfairness in distribution it's it's a complaint and I think a legitimate complaint about a sense that the that the work that a great many working people do is not va

lued is not honored and recognized by The Wider society and this is the anger about being looked down upon so it's not only about distribution it's about recognition contributive Justice what are the conditions under which people can through their work contribute to the common good and be seen as making valuable contributions even though the verdict of the labor market on the value of their contribution may suggest otherwise um and win honor and recognition for doing so I think that's the crisis

the polit The Source the Deep source of the political crisis we Face Raj I'll ask you to to reflect on on U what Michael just said but I'm going to uh first remind you of something that you said in a podcast that I was I listen to in in preparation for for um for this nothing is safe here this this this will um you will like this Michael the um so you were interviewed by uh Stephen Steve levit um and uh at one p point you were discussing the importance of Education uh for social mobility and in

particular your some of your work on the quality of teachers and um and and and Steve said um well isn't this an argument for increasing um sort of pay differentials you know pay the teachers um who are doing a much better job U much um higher and then of course this is not possible because of teachers unions and things like that and then you said in your response that but hold on you know it's that might be one answer and obviously it's the first answer that occurs to an economist but you said

think of an economy like Finland uh where it's actually the the recognition is conferred um to teachers not by material incentives but actually social status and that the smartest kids in the classroom actually want to be teachers not because they think they're going to get a lot of money which they want but because a lot of you know social recognition and esteem at has to that position that you said we're in a different equilibrium here in the United States so it that makes me think that you'r

e actually a lot of what Michael says um resonates with you but but do you think in economics as um in general that we're you know terribly underemphasizing the some of these both what goes into the utility function in terms of you know losing a job is probably the worst thing that could happen to somebody and that sort of has been you know validated in a lot of surveys and so forth um and yet you know as Michael said it's all of is that's not directly the only effect that that shows up in the w

ay we think about consumers is what it does directly to their income and their consumption possibilities not the much larger loss in terms of social recognition um and and so and that that does this focus on work social recognition status esteem is this something that that we're really completely um um neglecting um that we should make for yeah yeah know these are all great points so Michael mentioned canes and at some some level at a at a macro level you can kind of see the way economists were

conceptualizing this historically and have continued to and why I think that was wrong so some of you might know famous quote from canes that in a hundred years or so or predicting you know basically around this time nobody would be working because we'd be so rich no one would need to work if you took the traditional economic model that there's disutility of Labor the only reason you work is to generate consumption diminishing marginal utility of consumption at some point get satiated nobody wan

ts to work anymore so that was clearly completely wrong people still work quite a bit uh and that you know is a a rough piece of evidence that things along the lines of what Michael's suggesting that there's something meaningful about work that matters to people independent of purely generating consumption that that might be going on and certainly when you look at a more micro level and think about the decisions that people make in terms of career and uh What uh outcomes you see after word in te

rms of satisfaction or health the recent literature on deaths of Despair and mortality a lot of that seems to be associated with things like Dignity of work social status social connections how people are recognized and so I absolutely think that as a discipline that narrow and convenient and to be fair I think powerful conception of income and monetary rewards as a key driver incentives as being a key driver of what people do it does Miss import parts of decision making and I think can lead us

down paths that ultimately don't have as much inclusion as we could in our economy if we considered these factors now I think the tricky thing in terms of how we then move to policy Solutions if we recognize these issues is how do you actually achieve the equilibrium in Finland you know maybe it is true that social status is incredibly important you know the nice thing in a way if it was just about incentives is you can have a well-defined debate about how teachers get paid and you know should y

ou have more incentive pay and how do you raise the resources to pay teachers at a higher level and so on but if it's about social status I think we understand much less about how you change that equilibrium uh or is it even possible to change that equilibrium to policy or does that just somehow emerge endogenously and so I think you know for the many students here in the audience those are very interesting and important issues to think about and that would help us create a you know a new genera

tion of Economics that includes some of these other uh important factors so this is where I think Michael maybe you can give us an answer because if if markets and market prices are not going to be our yard stick for Value um and other things like social recognition esteem so and and if those are going to be determined somehow through public deliberation and different conception of civic virtue so what does that actually mean in practice how do we get closer to a society like that well first it

requires that we question an assumption into which all of us uh too easily slide and that's the assumption that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common good now a moment's reflection suggests that most of us don't really believe that even though we often assume that because if we did we would insist that the value of a contribution of the contribution of a hedge fund manager really is two or three thousand times greater than the value of the contribution of a nur

se or a school teacher or for that matter a doctor even vigorous Defenders of Les Fair free market economics would be hardpressed to make that claim which suggests that on reflection the verdict of the market on the value of people's respective contributions to the economy and the common good is uh deeply misleading which suggests that we as Democratic Citizens need to find a way somehow to reclaim from markets what we've done especially in the last four decades is we've outsourced our moral jud

gment about value what counts as a valuable contribution to markets and it's tempting to do that not just because markets deliver the goods and affluence and prosperity it's tempting to do that because markets seem to be a value neutral instrument to decide messy contested questions that otherwise we as Democratic citizens would have to think through and argue through and debate and disagree about ourselves and in pluralist societies we think that's a recipe for Conflict for disagreement maybe e

ven for the majority imposing its values on those who disagree and so we lean on markets as if they were value neutral ways of deciding fundamental questions about the value of contributions for us so what would it mean to reclaim for public deliberation questions about the value of various jobs we can Glimpse one small fleeting concrete example if we recall the way we thought and spoke about this during the pandemic when those of us who had the luxury of working from home couldn't help but reco

gnize How Deeply we depend on workers we often Overlook delivery workers warehouse workers grocery store clerks home health care workers nurse assistants truck drivers these are not the best paid or the most honored workers in our society but during the pandemic for a moment we were calling them essential workers and we were putting up signs thanking them and we were sometimes even applauding them at the end of the day it could have been a moment for a broader public debate about how to bring th

eir pay and recognition into better alignment with the importance of their work but alas the pandemic receded and that debate never really happened but I think that the starting point is to seize on moments of shared recognition like that moment to ask about wage policies to ask about forms of investment to ask about tax policies that prompt public debate about this question let me give one example suppose we had a debate from this point of view from the point of view of contributive not only di

stributive justice about why it is that we tax earnings from labor at a higher rate than we tax earnings from dividends interest in capital gains now we sometimes argue about that from the standpoint of fairness and who can best bear the burden of Taxation that's about distributive justice and it's important but suppose we had that debate also from the standpoint of contributive justice and asked whether the cont whether we should treat earnings differentially in this way and here's another quic

k example of of a of a concrete question that might provoke or could provoke that kind of broader debate the payroll tax is a tax on labor it's a regressive tax suppose we considered a proposal to eliminate the payroll tax or at least to eliminate the workers share of the payroll tax and to replace the Lost Revenue through some version of a Tobin tax a tax on speculative Financial activities now here again we might have that debate from the standpoint of fairness and who is best able to Bear the

burden of Taxation but we could also have that debate by asking whether speculative Financial activity especially a financial activity that that doesn't constitute uh investment or the direction of capital to the real economy to socially useful activities in the real economy is valuable enough to the economy and the common good one could argue whether it's valuable at all and some people have called that into question but valuable enough to by which I mean speculation and not investment in Brid

ges and Roads and schools and hospitals and and new companies but uh the kind of finance that involves speculating on the future assets of already existing assets real or synthetic does that really contribute to the economy and to the common good and if so does it contribute anything like the uh the value that the current uh syst system of pay but also after tax pay would reflect that would be another way of surfacing up the question of contributive Justice the debate a public debate about what

activities what economic activities really do constitute valuable contributions to the economy and to the common good you want to comment just on that yeah Denny can I just jump in you know everything Michael said I think highlights the complexities in valuing people's contributions and that's extremely important I want us to qualify a little bit and think about we've been focusing on the limitations of markets in valuing contributions and certainly there are many but I think it's also important

to remember that non-market Solutions can themselves have some limitations that are worth bearing in mind so take the example of teachers that you gave earlier if you look in the United States and look at cases where teacher pay is determined by governments and many wages in our economy are determined by governments rather than Market forces even the United States because of the size of government um you will find that teachers in public schools are often in many cases paid less than teachers w

hose wages are effectively set by the private Market to some extent for teaching in private schools or charter schools that face like less regulations and so forth and so that's a case where arguably the Market is actually valuing these folks contributions which I think many of us in this room would agree are incredibly valuable and should not be valued 3,000 times less than a hedge fund manager the Market's actually valuing those contributions more than the way we're effectively valuing them th

rough our public systems and so I think that's very important to keep in mind as we think about solutions that you know the it's not that NE necessarily the Market's getting it right there but when we deviate from the market it's not obvious that we're going to move uh in the right direction so I think that's something important to think about one other point to add is that of course Market wages are determined and equilibrium by both demand but also by Supply and so I think this ties back to so

me of the issues of Education that we discussed where we focused on how many people are getting college degrees and what kinds of um uh forces might help them versus non-educated uh workers who don't go to go to college but those things are linked so if more people go to college and attend higher quality colleges there are going to be fewer people competing for jobs like delivering groceries or driving Uber and things like that and that's going to through Market forces naturally drive up those w

ages and so I think in equilibrium you know if we're going to live in a market economy we've got to recognize that all of these things are connected and I think it's very important to think about how we qualify what the market equilibrium delivers but also recognize the powerful Market forces that are at play and try to think about how say increasing access to education may actually ultimately benefit those who are not getting that education because there's less competition among those folks who

are left out M you could I could I just add to that I agree in general terms Raj with that observation but I would just um I think it's worth bearing in mind that what counts as the market equilibrium and what counts as pay determined by governments as in the teacher case can often obscure way the way rules are written before markets do their work in allocating pay to various roles to go back to the example of Finance uh is uh are the earnings of people who work on Wall Street now that's not pa

y determined by government it seems It's pay determined by their companies and yet the government set the rules for example on carried interest the government set the rules on uh com interest paid by companies being tax deductible the government set the rules permitting rather than prohibiting stock BuyBacks now bearing all of those that that rulle making that goes into creating what seems on the surface to be a market equilibrium where pay is not determined by governments but by firms wouldn't

you agree that government has its hand in shaping the conditions that give rise to the market equilibria that generate the pay in the first place yes I mean no doubt it's true that the market equilibrium that emerges is a function of various choices we've made in government but I would argue that even in the cases where governments directly shaping pay it's not obvious that in our political equilibrium we're ending up in a place where people are being valued at their true social contribution so

I think we need to examine why that's happening in the case of teachers and the case of many other people uh employed by the government in adjacency to the issues I think you raising Michael before I turn to the audience for uh some questions I want to just ask you one final question um Raj to say a little bit more about some some remedies we've talked you've talked about education Michael has brought in questions about tax policy and different choices that we make as to who we tax but I want to

I want you to say a little bit about your work on um on on what you call economic connectedness uh the importance of of place and how different locations and communities differ in the um in the opportunities they provide in terms of uh uh allowing for connections across socioeconomic groups uh because that also have would have some implications for policy that go beyond education as well so you can just tell us a little bit about that work yeah absolutely so similar to the uh work we've done lo

oking at Economic Opportunity and Mobility for every college in America in other parts of our research we've examined how economic Mobility varies across neighborhoods in America depending upon where you grow up and we find there tremendous differences in children's chances of rising up across different areas in different cities it turns out in the US in the rural Midwest for example if you take a child born to a family say at the 25th percentile of the national income distribution they're very

likely to reach the middle class or Beyond whereas if you look at the child born at the exact same income level in a place like Charlotte North Carolina or in many other cities in the United States they may not even be doing better than their parents on average so opportunity varies greatly across cities and it turns out actually to vary greatly even within cities so if you look in Boston at people growing up in Dorchester or Roxberry versus uh you know in the western suburbs versus in um places

like River and Everett there are very different chances of rising up and so we've had a research program along with many other social scientists trying to understand what the origins are of these differences in Economic Opportunity and as Danny highlights one of the key factors we and others have uncovered is being a key determinant of these differences in Mobility is social capital and I Echo some of the work of Bob putam here at the Kennedy school where one particular form of Social Capital t

he degree of cross-class interaction which we measure using Facebook data the number of high-income friends that low-income people have and we're able to measure that zip code by ZIP code again using sort of a big data approach that is an incredibly strong predictor of differences in economic mobility and turns out to be the strongest predictor anyone is identified to date why is that we're trying to understand you know why you find that type connection it could be because networks create opport

unities for job referrals the vast majority of jobs that people get in the US are through referrals it could be that aspirations are shaped by who you're connected to if you've never met anyone who went to college maybe applying to college let alone a place like Harvard is just not on your radar screen and that completely changes people's trajectories and so in a series of papers we and others I think are increasingly finding that this sort of mechanism is extremely important in shaping economic

Mobility both at the neighborhood level and I suspect also likely at the college level some of the data that we've been looking at here you know as much as we'd like to think that the great treatment effects of attending Harvard are driven by our great professors here at Harvard I think a lot of it is probably about who you get connected to and the net works you form and so forth and so mechanism is extremely important so why does that matter for policy you know in the in when you have that vie

w of the world you might then think about how you create more integration how you connect people from different backgrounds through residential desegregation through programs that might bring different types of people into contact with each other there are many different uh things to explore and I think that's an interesting area for further policy intervention for further work let me make one final point that connects this back to some of the conversation we've been having earlier I find Denny

that this uh granular data on how your odds of success very greatly depending upon where you grew up is actually a great way to counter The Narrative you described Michael that that can be very corrosive where people feel like I made it to the top of the distribution it's totally my own doing you didn't make it you know you must not be you don't have as much Merit uh you know you're not as qualified actually the first exercise I have students do in an large undergraduate class I teach here at Ha

rvard called using big data to solve social problems Sanders Theater is to have students imagine take the opportunity outl data publicly accessible type in your ZIP code now imagine you grew up two miles down the road how do you think based on the research we're discussing your life would have been different would you actually be sitting here in Sanders Theater the answer typically is no you know your odds of success would be dramatic ially different that is I think a way to show people how much

yes you know hard work matters greatly but your circumstances matter greatly as well and I think that kind of approach can be very helpful contextualizing and this this Dan Danny is one of the many reasons that although I'm gently giving Raj a hard time this this work is enormously important and enormously impressive and and it's and the way that it connects with your work Michael is that so if I understand it correctly and and and correct me if I'm wrong is it's not an individual's own connect

ions that you're examining because you actually don't know that you're just looking at the average level of Connections in the community in which an individual grew up um so it's in that sense it's not it's just sort of a community contribution that's not that that so that's it's very interesting so let's um let's see if we can have um some questions I I can see from the number of hands um I may try to group some questions um if they are sort of unrelated so let's start over here I'm going to tr

y to go from one side to another so thank you very much my name is if you can be short please absolutely um cud is first to the person who decided to bring the three of you on stage together rash you mentioned Kane's paper I think it's called the possibilities of our grandchildren looks uh 100 years down writes it in the middle of the depression and writes this burst of optimism um if you were to write your possibilities of grand children paper maybe just looking 50 years ahead but but anyway da

ring you to to think about like what would be the the main ideas of of of that paper um what what would be your possibilities of grandchildren paper and this is actually to the three of you so whoever I was gonna say a better question for Michael who thinks and uh and Danny than maybe let's take another question while M Michael thinks and maybe you'll you'll have I'm happy to comment but yes let me take one question from here yes over in this this stable sorry yes sendler um visiting PhD fellow

at MIT Sloan I was wondering um what do the recent changes in affirmative action regulation in the US sort of how do they affect the Dynamics regul affirmative action for College admission how do affect all these d Dynamics you were um discussing thank you yeah so let's let's can you want to answer that question specifically yeah go Ahad and I can comment a bit on both great to get Michael's reactions as well so on the affirmative action decision you know of course limiting the use of race and c

ollege admissions so what consequences does that have and how does that interact with some what we've been talking about here so uh you know that's of course going to impact a different form of diversity you know racial and ethnic diversity and our best evidence from prior uh bans on affirmative action for example in California when uh that happened there back in the 90s is that this is going to have an impact on racial diversity even in equilibrium as colleges look for other measures that might

um you know think about identifying diversity in other ways now in our work and a lot of our conversation today is focused on a related Dimension socioeconomic diversity correlated with race of course but not exactly the same simplest way to think about that is most low-income people in America are white not black so even if you think more about putting weight on socio economic diversity you're never going to get to the same place in terms of racial diversity now one thing that I think is inter

esting that's come out of the Supreme Court decision is colleges have been forced to reevaluate how they do admissions we put out our paper that I briefly described here a couple weeks after that decision and because colleges have been forced to revisit admissions by race it's also a great time to Revis s by class to think about Legacy issues and other related issues and I suspect a lot of that is going to happen going forward one interesting pattern we're seeing as we talked with college presid

ents and administrators around the US is a focus on identifying other measures of adversity that maybe get to the core of why we what we care about and be interesting to get Michael's perspective on this and you know just what seems fair in the process of admission so I'll give you one concrete example uh Yale University just announced that they are going to use that opportunity Atlas data that I was just describing on how kids chances of uh rising up vary across different neighborhoods in their

admissions process basically they're going to say if you came from a neighborhood where historically very few kids have risen up we're going to give you a bit of an advantage for overcoming adversity getting to the same place in the admissions process we're relative to kids who didn't have to overcome that because opportunity in America is greatly correlated with race black people tend to live in communities that have lower rates of upward Mobility that is going to have the effect incidentally

of creating more racial diversity as well and so I think colleges are going to look to tools like this let me briefly comment on the initial question on 50 years from now you know I don't like to make predictions partly because I suspect I will also be wrong and so don't want to repeat kan's mistake in in some sense but you know what I would hope for is a society where where I think over the past 50 or 100 years we've developed this capitalistic engine based on basic principles and economics tha

t in some ways have been been incredibly powerful and successful in generating Innovation high levels of overall growth and so on but have clearly been incredibly unequal and non-inclusive and my hope is partly through conversations like this research that people are doing we will have a system that you know is producing more equ rewards creating more opportunity and harnessing more Talent uh in a more effective way 50 years from now so to to address that that question I like raja's answer to uh

to the affirmative action questions I hope I don't know whether I predict but I hope that 50 50 years from now or maybe sooner we will be more inclined to question or to ask the questions what features of the economy we should take as fixed and what features we should view as subject to contestation and debate the discussion we had about whether the market the labor market is an accurate verdict on the value of contributions is one such example I would give two other quick examples of this the

first goes back to this question of the frenzied competition to get into top universities in the United States and this is partly because the college wage premium has more or less doubled in recent decades now one way of viewing that development is to say it's simply the way things are in a highly technological Society there is a greater need for highly skilled workers and that's why the college premium has increased it's an exogenous variable it's a fact of nature that we have simply to adapt t

o maybe through redistributive policiy or it could be viewed in another way consider this analogy if over the last 40 years the pay gap between men and women doubled we would consider that a problem and be debating how to fix it or if the pay gap for the last 40 years between white workers and African-American workers sub substantially increased we would consider that a problem and debate how to fix it question should we regard the doubling of the college wage premium in that way or as a fact of

life in a knowledge economy that's an example of what I mean about questioning what we take as fixed uh in the economy and what we take as contestable the other example goes to what I learned from Danny rodri back when he was saying that the finance-driven version of neoliberal globalization was not the only way of conceiving or enacting globalization but the politicians in particular now put aside the economists the politicians who celebrated that version of globalization presented it as a fac

t of nature to which we just had to adapt if you want to compete and win in the global economy go to college what you earn will depend on what you learn these were the mantras this was the bracing advice that politicians gave in how to respond to what seemed to be as they presented it a fact of nature Bill Clinton spoke of the the global globalization of the economy is like water running downhill and Tony Blair described it he said there are some who say we should stop and debate globalization b

ut we may as well debate whether Autumn should follow summer well here's an example of how already we've seen a change uh in what we take as fixed and what we take as contestable because now looking back on Bill Clinton and Tony blows account of the inevitability of globalization as like the changing of the seasons it was it was smug at the time but it now seems quaint this analogy to the seasons because climate change has reconfigured the seasons summer is hotter and lasting longer some scienti

sts predict that absent changes in the way we live in in 50 years science sorry summer will last for half the year so what's possible the line between what's possible and what's necessary shifts beneath our feet and today and certainly I hope 50 years from now we will have to find ourselves figuring out how to debate and to decide whether Autumn should follow summer Miche do you like um uh the example that um uh Raj gave of universities using the opportunity Atlas to give those applicants from u

h communities where there is less upward Mobility given though legs up in the in the application process yes I mean I have this broader reservation about the extent to which we should uh Focus mainly on Mobility rather than equality but putting that broader uh concern aside which is a longer discussion I think that's a good thing I also think it's a good thing that uh universities uh ask a similar question about first generation applicants and uh and attend to that aspect of of admission but yes

I wonder though if this becomes common the future Supreme Court would would U basically knock it down saying that you can't use the attributes of a group um that because it's it's not the individual is overcome adversity but it's just just an average but it's an interesting question let's let's um um a couple more questions yes hi I'm V I'm an mp1 from India uh thank you so much for the talk my questions to Raj you talked about uh making education more vocational and slightly more career focuse

d in some ways but I was wondering if this does not sort of risk uh you know pivoting people towards certain kinds of careers and more importantly like who's making the decisions about what these career goals and what these specific aspects of these vocational uh based educational institution should be like another question from yes hi I'm venty from the mpid 2 um actually quite related to that I imagine there would be substantial fiscal pressures not only to bring people to these New Frontiers

of skills and Technology but to bring these to bring people and citizens there on mass to ensure that there's continued up from poverty social mobility and uh overcoming inequality so I I wonder if your findings and you know the broader discussion can point to any new or alternative models of Education that could ensure we have the capacity to continue training people uh in depth and also quickly to ensure that they have the skills to ensure our continue economic growth especially with more adva

nced manufacturing and services jobs now since both questions were on education if there are other educations related questions might as well so here's yeah hi um I am Kash from Nepal and mpid so my question regarding what Professor sandel mentioned on contributive Justice and your topic regarding socionomic Mobility how could universities then now reimagine their curriculum not only in terms of promoting social economic Mobility but also maybe to improve the uh sort of appreciation or intrinsic

value for all work like is it a function of the school system or is it just a function of the markets later on okay who wants to start one way um well here's one way I would change our system of higher education I would I think we should uh consider and discuss and debate how we should how we might reverse the Steep hierarchy of Prestige that uh between this the IB plus and other selective colleges and universities and other institutions of learning um in the United States I think we with the p

ossible exception of Britain um have have created uh such a hierarchy of prestige that it not only leads to unfairness for those who don't get in and who don't attend who don't get a four-year degree and that's most most people but it also I think does damage to the winners because the price they pay the price we pay for this anxiety packed highly pressurized meritocratic tournament is that we convert the Adolescent years of our young people into a kind of battlefield of credentialing that isn't

good for them and such that by the time they arrive we have so ingrained in them the imperatives to network and gather their credentials and jump through hoops and to see their education instrumentally that the undergraduate years uh it becomes hard to preserve the what the what an undergraduate education should be a time to reflect about what's worth caring about and why there's very little space for that if once you arrive here well if if colleges and universities become as I fear they have b

ecome basic training in applying for stuff and and so I think that's one reason Beyond questions of fairness and and the our citizens who are left behind it's also corrosive of the intrinsic purpose of higher education I worry that the heavy emphasis on credentialing and networking is crowding out our educational Mission so although the the cultural significance and centrality and Prestige and maybe also the endowments of these now strategic socially strategic institutions Loom very large large

it isn't good for Education never mind for fairness so this is this is one of the ways I think we need to rethink what we're doing and the way we've conscripted higher education into the frenzied anxiety stwn but wounding a battlefield of Merit I can briefly jump in Michael very nicely addressed the last question I'll briefly touch upon the the first two questions that were asked so you know you raised the issue of whether vocational training runs the danger of you know who chooses which skills

are provided I think that kind of question makes is especially relevant In This Very Dynamic economy where new technologies things like AI are disrupting many Industries you know the danger I think of vocational career-oriented education is that you get trained in a skill set that seems relevant today but 10 years from now that narrow thing is no longer relevant and because you don't have that broader more versatile skill base now there's no longer a payoff so that I think that's absolutely a co

nsideration to keep in mind and that's in some sense the defense of the more broad liberal art sort of Education that could help you uh pursue various paths that being said I would note a couple of things so first in these programs that show very large impacts like I was discussing year up for example or other sectoral job training programs you should not think of this as the margin of people picking career a versus career B but often people on the margin of just non-employment just having reall

y no career prospects in many cases and now they've been put on a stable employment trajectory that at least gives them a foothold in the economy and maybe they get some on the job skills and and are on a productive you know dignified uh path and so from that perspective I'm less concerned about that kind of issue I think the deeper concern relates to the other question is about the scalability of this sort of education and thinking about fiscal pressures in particular particularly at a time whe

n many states are cutting back on the amount spent on education I think that's an extremely important issue uh and thinking about how we preserve political support for funding education um in a way that can create opportunities for a lot more people and coming back to what I was saying earlier about the supply side pressures reducing number of people competing for jobs that do not require those uh college degrees and so I think a uh showing the value of certain types of Education very clearly an

d generating more support for that sort of funding would be valuable and B figuring out more cost effective models for Effective Education is extremely important because the fact is you know no matter what we think the impacts of a Harvard type education are it's just way too expensive to be the type of educational product that going to be scaled and so I think we need to figure out how to have uh scalable uh highly effective systems of Education which you know related to that first chart with a

ll the dots I showed basically we haven't quite figured out yet in the US could I just add a quick word of support to what Raj has said Isabelle sahill at the Brookings institutes about six years ago did a study about Federal support for different kinds of education and she found that the federal government um invest uh as of SE several years ago in high in helping uh students attend higher education $162 billion a year and the amount the federal government spends on vocational and Technical Tra

ining 1.1 billion 162 to 1.1 which reflects I think um not only the funding problem but a funding problem that in turn is an expression of the credentialist Tilt to the way we think about contribution okay I think we have time for a couple more questions uh yes over there um hi thank you for such an interesting discussion and you mentioned your your idea of contributional Justice hinges upon you know cont uh contribution to uh the society the common good but how do you Define what the common goo

d is you know um how can what is good and what is bad contribution what what kinds of jobs are good or bad because for example a blue collar worker in the US might be earning more than a blue collar worker in India or any other developing part of the world so how how do we how do we bring it to like an equal level right like um the back over there one more um yeah so your time suffer visiting PhD student HBS I just a question to Raj about the you showed the slide with the basically the demise of

the American dream do you have the time Dimension also for the role of higher education IV League plus institutions um do they like do they change their role as well in the society and I guess more of a political economy question so if it's a way for Elites to reproduce them M elves and keep their kind of Ben like privilege um how difficult will it be to change that and I guess affirmative action is a good case of elite kind of saying No don't touch it right hello thanks all I'm an economist in

TS Collin and visiting faculty in government here so I would like to reflect a bit on um opportunity and Mobility if if I were to rephrase the point that uh professor sandel said on Mobility by D wordss would be like it's not maybe the most binding constraint for democratization or equality but if Mobility is not the most binding constraint then what's the most binding constraint isn't it the influence of the elites what is the role of Harvard to redistribute opportunity why is the role of Harv

ard to set the tone of the debate about the sequencing of Seasons what is why is the role of the elite to say what type of should we just preoccupy ourselves with diminishing the influence of the Elites in general in the in political debate as opposed to like micro fixing you know second order derivatives into improving policy here and there which is very econ clastic for an economist as myself but maybe that's the the issue would should be addressing take one final question and then you'll have

the final last word thank you mine builds on the question of the definition of the common good um I was struck by the discussions around Justice fairness um and no of what we value and I'm just curious as we think about defining these things do we need to come to consensus about this and if so how do we begin to think about arriving at consensus in defining some of these topics uh in a pluralistic society and I mean especially one today that is just so divided um and you had mentioned U Mr Send

el the the need for more public deliberation um where do we even begin to have those conversations um and are there limits to scalability in terms of who's included in those conversations and how we should approach them Michael you have 30 seconds to Define for us the common good and and and get us all to agree and and this is it we'll have another one in a few months well one way of uh it's true we live in in pluralist societies and it's also true that that complicates the project of deliberati

ng as Citizens about the common good or for that matter about Justice or the role and reach of markets or what we owe one another as fellow citizens these are all contestable questions but the real question is whether if you believe in democracy you think that we must shrink from disagreement about values there's a powerful tendency that we have to do just that to think that our public life will be less contentious less clamorous less polarized if we ask people to leave their moral and spiritual

convictions outside when they enter the Public Square but the problem with that solution though it seems to be a way toward a more tolerant Society we don't want to mix it up about our competing values or conceptions of the the common good the problem with that Society is that it leads to um a morally empty Public Square it leads to a vacuum a hollow public discourse that consists either of narrow managerial technocratic talk which inspires no one or when passion enters we have shouting matches

partisan shouting matches and ideological food fights on talk radio and on social media and for that matter on the floors of Congress and this can this is what we're doing now so we've got plenty of polarization now we have plenty of trouble reaching consensus on anything now so the question is whether uh as I propose we would have a healthier Democratic life if we welcomed into the Public Square competing conceptions of what counts as a valuable contribution to the common good what counts as a

just distribution of income and wealth and power and opportunity if we had a morally more robust kind of public debate recognizing that it will be messy and contentious and controversial but also acknowledging that the alternative of trying to create a kind of morally neutral Public Square simply well it does one of two things it relegates these questions to markets which seem to be neutral but we all know are not value neutral ways of allocating Goods or determining investment or setting pay t

hey're not uh the other problem with trying to keep moral argument about the common good out of public debate is that sooner or later where there is a vacuum of larger public meaning and purpose that space will be filled and when it's filled it will be filled by narrow intolerance moralism typically coming from either fundamentalism or hyperism and that's exactly what's happened in the aftermath of four Decades of a market driven attempt to seek a a kind of neutral public space where the econ ec

onomy and the imperatives the necessities of globalization were seemed to be fixed by nature and therefore open to be determined by the experts that kind of technocracy that created such an empty Hollow public discourse in public space that sadly it's been largely filled by the harshest most intolerant uh voices seeking to fill which has landed us with the polarized condition we face today I can just add one final point to to what Michael said on how to create this informed public debate which I

absolutely agree you know is a key to addressing some of these problems going forward I think being transparent about the challenges we Face by measuring very clearly how opportunity and inequality vary by circumstances across colleges as we've been focusing on today across neighborhoods across schools by Race by ethnicity bringing facts to Bear to Anchor these sorts of discussions even if people may bring different values to combine with that sort of data can be very valuable and we're now in

a position in the social sciences to be able to do this uh systematically and my hope is we can continue to build on that going forward to have a more informed public discourse in the years to come which is why I love your kind of social science well it's this has been I I've really enjoyed this thank you so much Raj thank you Michael