Raj Chetty Quotes

The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.

Misguided liberal Joseph Stiglitz.Columbia University professor and Nobel Prize winner, claims the American dream is dead.

Our parents’ incomes play a larger role in our personal economic fortunes than is true for other peer countries.

You've got first-generation Americans here who are going to be poorer than their parents. That's never happened in the States before, and it's going to have massive social repercussions here.

America is a place where you can be born into a low-income household but still lift yourself up, and it doesn't matter what color you are.

Economic growth is necessary to keep the promise - enormously important to individual Americans - that each generation will have the opportunity to become more prosperous than the preceding one, the popular term for which is 'the American dream.'

I worry about growing income inequality. But I worry even more that the discussion is too narrowly focused. I worry that our outrage at the top 1 percent is distracting us from the problem that we should really care about: how to create opportunities and ensure a reasonable standard of living for the bottom 20 percent.

The percentage of American 30-year-olds in 1970 who were earning more than their parents had earned at 30? Ninety-two percent. Isn’t that amazing? That, in a nutshell, is what we call the American Dream. And what’s the percentage now? It’s somewhere around 50 percent

As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen's ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.

Upward mobility across classes peaked in the U.S. in the late 19th century. Most of the gains of the 20th century were achieved en masse; it wasn't so much a phenomenon of great numbers of people rising from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all classes. You didn't have to be exceptional to rise.

The anger from Occupy Wall Street is coming from this simple fact: America no longer seems to be a place where you can work your way up, from rags to riches, from lower class to middle class to upper class.

The most important thing of all is my parents were able to leave all four of their children better off than themselves. That story has a name, it's called the American dream.

American Dream Is Under Assault. People that haven't been able to find a job in months and this growing sense in this country that this is the new normal, well we can't accept that.

It is true that the top quintile is getting richer while the bottom is getting poorer, but the bottom is not the same people. There is, fortunately, a constant churning at the bottom as new immigrants move in and those who used to be on the bottom begin their long, thrilling upward climb to the American dream.

America has tolerated inequality because people think they can get ahead. If you have immobility on top of inequality, then people are not going to be happy campers. If you're stuck on the bottom and there just isn't much churning in society and you're stuck there through your adulthood, that's not a nice life to look forward to.

Today, the message is that we have to help the middle class and the aspirational worker in the United States.

Today, families like the one I grew up in still believe in that American dream. But as President Obama says, it's a make-or-break moment for the middle class. Mitt Romney's plans would make things worse.

We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have-nots. We must always be a nation of haves and soon-to-haves.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

There are more and more products with fewer people able to consume them. We have to help those who don't have the economic stability to grow, or one day there will be very few who are able to buy what we're selling.

One thing we're going to focus on is the middle class and the crushing prices and stagnant wages they're facing. What motivates me is looking at my 3-year-old son and thinking about what we're passing on to him and his future wife and their future kids.

For people who are at the bottom economically, the world is becoming a harder and harder place. And yet the incentives to become rich are so great because enormous amounts of wealth are being accumulated. And so those two things, that carrot and stick, are beating people along this trajectory of trying desperately to move up in the world.

Sometimes I make more money in a weekend than my grandpa made in a year.

I guess that's one of the things about growing up in the fifties - it never occurred to me that you wouldn't be at least as successful as your parents.

What many economists fail to understand is that poor people are no less concerned about improving their lot and that of their children than rich people are.