This story appears in the June 28, 2015 issue of Forbes. Subscribe
Hometown: New Delhi, India
Alma Mater: Harvard University, Ph.D., A.B.
Specialty: Economics
Day job: Professor at Harvard
Cred: Chetty earned his Ph.D. at 23, won tenure at the University of California, Berkeley at 27 and returned to Harvard at 29 with a full professorship. At 32 he won a MacArthur Foundation genius award and at 33 the John Bates Clark Medal, for the most promising economist under 40. Using big data sets and behavioral insights, he has done groundbreaking work on income inequality, school quality, taxes and retirement.
Best Investment: His house in Cambridge, Mass. In 2010 Raj and his wife, Sundari, a neuroscientist and Harvard stem cell researcher, bought it for $1.6 million. It has since doubled in value, and its location has paid off in saved commuting time.
Pay-it-forward wisdom: Money matters. Social scientists "debate whether money is ultimately the best metric of whether a policy works," Chetty notes, but growing up in both India and the U.S. convinced him that "it plays an important role in happiness and well-being."
Best Idea: Pay up for better school districts or private schools. While saving for emergencies and retirement is important, putting $10,000 extra into your child's primary education may have a greater payoff in overall family wealth than investing $10,000 in the stock market, Chetty says. His research has found that having standout teachers in the early years boosts college completion and earnings of young adults. This is true, he says, not only for poor children "but for families at the 75th or even 99th percentile of the income distribution."
