CityReads│Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems

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 Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems

Raj Chetty has an idea for introducing students to economics that could transform the field — and society.

Sources: https://opportunityinsights.org/course/

https://qz.com/1103806/a-pioneering-economics-class-is-tackling-social-justice-issues-with-big-data-and-women-and-minorities-are-enrolling-in-droves/

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/14/18520783/harvard-economics-chetty

Raj Chetty, a prominent faculty member whom Harvard poached back from Stanford last year, this spring unveiled “Economics 1152: Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems.” Taught with the help of lecturer Greg Bruich, the class garnered 375 students, including 363 undergrads, in its first term. That’s still behind the 461 in Ec 10 — but not by much.

There’s little discussion of supply and demand curves, of producer or consumer surplus, or other elementary concepts introduced in classes like Ec 10. There is no textbook, only a set of empirical papers. The material is relatively cutting-edge. Of the 12 papers students are required to read, 11 were released in 2010 or after. Half of the assigned papers were released in 2017 or 2018. Chetty co-authored a third of them.

Chetty’s class offers a new way to teach an introductory course, yet at the same time is more closely aligned with what contemporary economic research looks like. And it’s showing how to teach introductory economics as an introduction to doing economics — not just observing it from afar.

This course will show how "big data" can be used to understand and solve some of the most important social and economic problems of our time. The course will give students an introduction to frontier research in applied economics and social science that does not require prior coursework in Economics. Topics include equality of opportunity, education, innovation and entrepreneurship, health care, climate change, and crime. In the context of these topics, the course will also provide an introduction to basic statistical methods and data analysis techniques, including regression analysis, causal inference, quasi-experimental methods, and machine learning. The course will include discussions with leading practitioners who will discuss how they use big data in real-world applications.

The course has three principal learning objectives: 1) to introduce students to frontier social science research on key social and economic issues, 2) to teach students how to analyze data using modern quantitative methods and basic programming techniques, and 3) to show students to how practitioners are using data to analyze social problems.

This course is fundamentally about tools — learning to use them, learning when to use which, and learning what they can and cannot do for you. And it trains students to use those tools to study inequality, specifically: in their own neighborhoods, in housing, in education, and more. Rather than having weekly problem sets (the standard pedagogy in most introductory econ classes), Ec 1152 asks students to complete four major projects in which students directly analyze data.

One project asks them to examine the mobility data that Chetty and his co-authors collected, and see how mobility varies in and around their hometown. Another asks students to analyze an ongoing experiment offering housing vouchers to encourage poor families to move to higher-opportunity areas.

Topics are divided into eight parts: equality of opportunity, education, racial disparities, health, criminal justice, climate change, tax policy, behavioral public economics, and economic development and institutional change.

The course’s lecture videos and other course materials are already available online. For the most recently taught course in the spring of 2019, please visit: https://opportunityinsights.org/course/

For the course taught in 2017 at Stanford, please visit: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/bigdatacourse/

Sociological analysis of the student body taking Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems

Chetty’s class, “Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems,” attracted 200 students during the spring quarter in 2017 It was Stanford’s most popular economics class, with more students than the university’s equivalent of Econ 101.

Far more women and minorities attended his course, and more came to office hours, which can be intimidating for the uninitiated. close to half of Chetty’s class was female. More women also took Chetty’s class than the Stanford equivalent of Econ 101. His impression is that the class upped the number of female and minority economics majors as well.

The course was most recently taught at Harvard in Spring 2019, and, with an enrollment of 375 students, was one of the largest classes in the university. The course also increased gender diversity in Economics: 49% of the students who took the course were women, higher than in any other undergraduate Economics course taught at Harvard in the past academic year (among classes with at least 20 students). “On other dimensions we examined — e.g., race and parental income — the course looks fairly similar to other classes in Econ and in the college,” Chetty clarified in an email. But students of color, and with lower parental incomes, found much to connect with in the curriculum.

Students who grew up in the low-income areas Chetty’s class studied were surprised to see their stories reflected in the field’s research. The professor remembers students filing into office hours and telling him, “I really see myself in these data, in this class.”

Chetty believes the class was ultimately a success because it tackled “things people felt really touched their lives personally, and mattered in terms of what they were reading in the news.”

Economics is infamously unwelcoming to women and minorities. Of the 79 economics Nobel prizes ever awarded, only one has gone to a woman. Less than one in five tenured or tenure-track economics professors are women, and the gap between the share of women off and on the track remains high. Women in the field are also penalized for teamwork: A study from Harvard found that men were just as likely to get tenure whether they published coauthored papers or not; women, instead, became less likely to gain tenure the more they worked with others.

About Raj Chetty

Raj Chetty is a professor of economics at Harvard University, specializing in the field of public economics. Some of Chetty's recent papers have studied equality of opportunity in the United States and the long-term impact of teachers on students' performance.

He already had a leg up upon entering Harvard in 1997 thanks to his father, V.K. Chetty, an Indian American economist who advised the government of Indira Gandhi.

“[He] did a bunch of stuff deregulating as India moved from a socialist economy to more of a capitalist economy,” the younger Chetty recalls. “Whenever I see [Nobel economist] Jim Heckman, he’ll say, “I’ve known you since you were 2 years old,’ and then start criticizing my paper.”

Chetty didn’t take Ec 10 when he was an undergraduate at Harvard. He skipped to the intermediate curriculum, and spent the rest of his time as an undergrad taking graduate-level coursework. He graduated in three years, got his PhD from Harvard in another three (at the ripe old age of 23), and got tenure at UC Berkeley at 27. He moved to Harvard at 29, joining the likes of Larry Summers as a rare Harvard professor to make tenure before turning 30. He won the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded annually to the best American economist under the age of 40, at only 33.

He’s used data to debunk the American Dream, challenge the Ivies as engines of social mobility, and become an authority on inequality. He’s shuttled from top university to top university, scored a MacArthur “genius” grant, and landed on Forbes’ 40 under 40 list.

He became a true public figure with the publication of a pair of papers in 2014 mapping economic mobility — measured as the correlation between people’s incomes and that of their parents — across the United States, down to the neighborhood level. The papers received rapturous write-ups in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Because Chetty and his co-authors posted all their data online — thus enabling others to run their own analysis and see what factors predict economic mobility — it quickly reoriented the debate about equality of opportunity in think tanks on both the right and left. Conservatives argued it showed that single parents hurt mobility; the Center for American Progress used the data to argue that unions improve mobility.

From then on, the release of a Chetty paper-or another paper from Opportunity Insights, the Harvard research group where he serves as director — became in and of itself a news event. The New York Times usually makes an interactive out of the big ones, including wildly viral pieces that let you see how much people from your childhood neighborhood earn, how black boys are left out of economic growth, and how many people from the top 1 and bottom 20 percent attend your college alma mater.

Chetty has thus become a strange kind of public-facing economist. He has become a prominent figure outside the field without really trying to become a public commentator the way Paul Krugman, Milton Friedman, or John Kenneth Galbraith before him did. His reputation, among laypeople and economists alike, rests almost entirely on his corpus of research, not his pronouncements on policy or op-eds.

His work has political implications, but he shies away from making firm policy recommendations himself. While Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush informally consulted with him during the 2016 race, he has never taken a government advisory job.

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