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" There is nothing superfreaky, or even a little freaky, about Harvard economist Raj Chetty. So it&amp;#039;s hard to see how he&amp;#039;s going to make something of himself in a field in which novel approaches to boutique problems get you straight to Oprah. (Proof of why Thomas Carlyle called it the dismal science.) There is zero Oprah potential for Chetty. And because he is so boring, it&amp;#039;s all the more important to extol his many essential virtues.  His foundational virtue is that he&amp;#039;s maddeningly apolitical and insists on &amp;quot;evidence&amp;quot; to support his conclusions before he starts theorizing about something, say, the effects of unemployment insurance or corporate taxation on society. In a world awash in data, he says, we can calculate best solutions and not leave things to guesswork or entrenched biases or asinine politicians to figure out the best economic policy. He wants for &amp;quot;the math to guide the intuition, not for the intuition to guide the math.&amp;quot; This sounds simple and self-evident, but it&amp;#039;s actually something close to revolutionary. Milton Friedman&amp;#039;s sciatica has been more influential in the past than hard data. Ditto Alan Greenspan&amp;#039;s devotion to hack novelist Ayn Rand. And Arthur Laffer&amp;#039;s napkin doodles.  But Chetty is so boring that he wants to transform the field of economics into an endeavor as rigorous as the most rigorous hard sciences. Truly, at the tender age of thirty-one (Martin Feldstein&amp;#039;s assistant at seventeen, professor at Berkeley at twenty-three, tenured at Harvard at twenty-nine), he has obviously already failed as a theorist, as the number-one rule of economic theorists has always been to make proof somebody else&amp;#039;s problem. Proof is for losers. Traditionally, here&amp;#039;s how it&amp;#039;s gone: 1) spout off; 2) name a &amp;quot;Curve,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Theory,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Dictum&amp;quot; after yourself; 3) get tenure at Harvard, Chicago, or Stanford; 4) advise a president and have your theory blown apart in the real world; and 5) spend the rest of your career writing books about how if they had just more faithfully followed your advice...  The son of an economic advisor to Indira Ghandi but raised mostly in Milwaukee, Chetty meant to become a medical researcher but decided that waiting for small things to happen in small labs wasn&amp;#039;t for him. He wanted to change the world on a large scale. He chose correctly. In the past several years, he has addressed himself to large problems in the biggest lab possible and is now heralded as one of the most vital economic thinkers in the world. For instance, using data on worker behavior collected around the world, Chetty has calculated the optimal level and duration of unemployment benefits so that on one hand workers&amp;#039; lives are not horribly destabilized during a period of joblessness, while on the other hand the benefits don&amp;#039;t replace income to the extent that the unemployment lasts longer than it should. Through the numbers, Chetty found that if the proper balance is struck, these benefits are good for stimulating the economy and for keeping a stable society. Not surprisingly, his work is cherry-picked by political Washington for its own myopic purposes. The paper he wrote advocating a robust (but limited) system of unemployment benefits began with this line: &amp;quot;It is well known that unemployment benefits raise unemployment durations...&amp;quot; During last summer&amp;#039;s torturous charade over whether to extend unemployment benefits, opponents poached this one sentence and ignored the rest of Chetty&amp;#039;s report.  This amuses Chetty. But frankly, tawdry politics feels a million miles away as he folds himself into a chair in his corner office in Littauer Center, near Harvard Yard. Tall and gangly, Chetty could easily pass for a graduate student. A colleague pops in. &amp;quot;Lunch?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;No, thanks,&amp;quot; Chetty says. &amp;quot;Ate at my desk.&amp;quot; He then launches into another major piece of his recent work. Again, with a huge store of data collected from a longitudinal study out of Tennessee, Chetty&amp;#039;s been able to calculate with precision the value of a good kindergarten teacher. Based on the predictive value of future educational accomplishment, earnings, and general happiness, a good kindergarten teacher&amp;#039;s contribution to society should be valued at about $320,000 a year.  The look on Chetty&amp;#039;s face is priceless. It&amp;#039;s all just a question of what you value, but based on the facts, that would be the wage. In the meantime, there&amp;#039;s a whole world to change first. And if Raj Chetty achieves the profile he deserves, perhaps his science won&amp;#039;t be so dismal after all. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a8982/raj-chetty-1210/>