HIS NUMBERS DON'T LIE

Harvard economist Raj Chetty has a God’s-eye view of the pandemic’s damage

- Ben Steverman

Raj Chetty hasn’t eaten at a restaurant in months. In fact, he’s barely left his home near Harvard, where he is an economics professor. The MacArthur genius grant recipient has been getting his haircuts from a stem cell biologist—his wife.

If you want to understand what’s really wrong with the economy, this is a telling symptom: Chetty used to travel widely sharing insights from his work, which mines data to paint a vividly detailed picture of inequality in the U.S. Now he, like millions of other affluent Americans, is at home. That might seem harmless—Chetty and his wife enjoy cooking together and spending time with their 5-year-old daughter—until you confront the effects on the already- precarious livelihoods of the people who fed, clothed, and pampered this professional class.

When Covid-19 hit, Chetty and his team of about 40 researchers and policy specialists dropped everything— including work on inequality in housing, higher education, and longevity—to document the pandemic’s lopsided impact. The result is a data tracker that gives a day-by-day, state-by-state, and even neighborhood-by-neighborhood view of the coronavirus economy. First uploaded in May and frequently expanded since, it relies on nonpublic, proprietary data supplied by some of America’s largest corporations to give a level of detail, in real time, that traditional economic indicators can’t match.