‘The Michael Jordan of Whatever He Did’: How Raj Chetty ’00 Reshaped Economics

Raj Chetty ’00 was not interested in wasting time.

He had only been at Harvard for a week when he began emailing “a bunch of professors” asking if they were looking for research assistants — and soon got a response from Martin S. “Marty” Feldstein ’61, one of Harvard’s star economics professors and chair of Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers.

“It became clear to me that I was interested in doing a Ph.D in economics and studying these issues and being able to make a contribution,” Chetty said. “So starting my sophomore year, I basically didn’t take undergrad classes.”

Even during his early collegiate career, Chetty — now lauded as one of the greatest economists of his generation — was marked as an academic talent, always “a notch above” the rest of his classmates, according to former roommate John R. Gallelli ’00.

Within three years, Chetty had graduated from Harvard, and three years later — at just the age of 23 — he had earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in economics and was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In just another five years, he accepted a job at his alma mater, becoming one of Harvard’s youngest tenured economics professors.

But before he was an economics wunderkind whose work on economic and social mobility made national headlines and shot him to stardom, he was a talented undergraduate, laser-focused on his economics work — and his beloved Chicago Bulls.

Chetty’s college roommates recalled “many hours” playing basketball with the future economist, who was an avid fan of Michael Jordan.

“When we grew up, it was the Jordan era,” Chetty’s childhood family friend and future college roommate Giridhar M. Shivaram ’00 said. “He wanted to be the Michael Jordan of whatever he did.”

“He was a pretty decent basketball player,” Shivaram added. “Not as good as he is an economist.”

Gallelli said that they often drew on analogies from basketball to completing their Ec1011 problem sets.

“We always called Raj ‘MJ,’ because he was always able to help us figure out the tough problems,” Gallelli said. “We gave each other names like Scotty or Dennis for the other players on the polls when other people were able to figure out the tough problems. But Raj was always MJ.”

Raj Chetty '00 (third from right) stands with his Pfoho Belltower suitemates at Commencement in June 2000. By Courtesy of John F. Coyle

Still, when Chetty got injured — he dislocated his shoulder — it was not while shooting baskets, but rather while working on a problem set.

“So he played basketball with us, right? And didn’t get injured,” Jesse A. Visser ’00, Chetty’s longtime friend and blockmate said. “But of course he got injured doing his problem set.”

But while Chetty often dominated in the classroom, he did not always come out on top.

John F. Coyle ’00, Chetty’s former roommate, said they would often spend nights playing Mario Kart in their Pforzheimer suite.

“Whatever Raj goes on to do in this world, right? The record reflected, I could beat him in Mario Kart,” Coyle said.

From Student to Professor

With his passion for and talent in economics, Chetty could have pursued any number of opportunities in finance or other industries — but he instead decided to pursue academia.

Shivaram said this interest was fueled by Chetty’s parents, who valued using academic pursuits for societal impact.

“He could have been a master of the hedge fund universe if he wanted, but he made a choice not to do that,” Shivaram said.

Instead, Chetty threw himself into his research, and eventually began to focus on studying economic influences on upward mobility — an interest that he himself said was rooted in his upbringing.

Chetty’s father and mother were the only children in each of their families to receive an education, an entryway into their careers as an economist and physician, respectively.

“I had seen over the generations how that’s played out in our extended family, where my cousins have had extremely different opportunities, very different circumstances than my sisters and I have had, I think, just as a result of those educational opportunities my parents had versus their own siblings,” Chetty said, leading him to question how drivers of mobility might have lifelong impacts.

After finishing his Ph.D., Chetty became a professor at UC Berkeley. A few years later, in 2009, Chetty was asked to return to Harvard on tenure, an experience he called “surreal.” Other than a three-year stint at Stanford, he’s been in Cambridge ever since.

‘Meet Them At Their Level’

But despite his growing fame, Chetty’s roommates point to his continued commitment to social impact — and his grounded humility.

“I think the thing that’s been very, very consistent about Raj is that he really cares about impact. He is very capable technically but has very little interest in technicality for the sake of technicality, but is more interested in broad social impact,” Chetty’s classmate-turned colleague Jesse M. “Jess” Shapiro ’01, a Harvard economics professor, said.

That, he added, “has been true for as long as I’ve known him.”

Visser, Chetty’s college roommate, said that Chetty is “probably the only person in my life who I’ve met who I think has that pure, raw intellectual capacity, but you don’t know it when you just interact with him in a casual social context.”

“The sort of magnification, or extra benefit, of that is that he can explain stuff to anyone. He can talk to anyone and kind of meet them at their level,” Visser added.

Lawrence F. Katz, one of Chetty’s mentors and dissertation advisors, said even as a student, Chetty had a distinctive ability to communicate his complex work to results broad audiences could understand.

“He’s always been amazing at visualizing things, taking complicated stuff and turning it into a single killer graph that basically explains it much better than 50 pages of math can do,” not just for other economists, but policy makers and the general public, Katz said.

Chetty’s belief in the importance of making difficult concepts digestible helped lead to the creation of Economics 50: Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems, one of Harvard’s most popular electives.

“It struck me that Harvard students, obviously very bright students, should be able to teach in a similar way with very little technical background,” Chetty said.

For Chetty, Ec 50, as the course is colloquially known, has the potential to help change how people view and tackle pressing current-day issues.

“A lot of people really misperceive what economics is about, especially in the present day,” he said, adding that he wanted to design a course that would show students how “data analysis, thinking about equilibrium, thinking about incentives, can be useful in just the day to day challenges — like what you’re reading about in the newspaper.”

“Knowing how we can think about these questions from a scientific point of view, rather than a totally ideological debate,” he added, “would be very productive for our society.”

—Staff writer Avani B. Rai can be reached at avani.rai@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @avaniiiirai.

—Staff writer Tanya J. Vidhun can be reached at tanya.vidhun@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @tanyavidhun.