As class gaps grow, Goldman pursues more effective interventions

Benny Goldman was still an undergraduate at Macalester College when he joined Raj Chetty's team at Opportunity Insights nearly a decade ago as a predoctoral fellow, working to help organize the infrastructure required for the lab's big data approach to examining social inequality. Now in his first full year as an assistant professor at the Brooks School and the economics department, Goldman is paying it forward by mentoring his own predoctoral fellow, Mahmoud Majdi. Together, they are working to expand Goldman's research on how to improve access to the American Dream and how marriage patterns shape inequality within and across generations.

"I was lucky enough to get in on the ground floor at Opportunity Insights in the early days of the lab, so I am excited that my work has come full circle and I have the chance to bring in fresh perspectives here at Brooks," Goldman said. "At this stage, our focus has shifted from identifying barriers to economic mobility-and how they vary across groups and places-to finding cost-effective interventions with meaningful, long-term impact."

Goldman's early work at Opportunity Insights focused on developing the big data tools needed to study intergenerational economic mobility, particularly by leveraging data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the IRS. When linked with other sources-such as school graduation or marriage records-these individual-level datasets provide a powerful framework for analyzing how socioeconomic mobility changes over time.

Goldman received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 2024 under the supervision of Chetty, and they worked together on his paper "Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility," which was invited for revision at the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

That research found that intergenerational mobility changed rapidly by race and class in recent decades: Class gaps have widened, while race gaps have narrowed across a range of outcomes, including earnings, educational attainment, and mortality. Perhaps most striking was the finding that these changes were fully explained by changes in the quality of the environments where children were raised-driven largely by differences in their social communities.

"With new big data tools, we can measure the long-term impact of interventions aimed at improving outcomes for low-income children that were implemented decades ago,"

Goldman said. "This allows us to identify which factors matter most and what kinds of interventions are most effective. At the end of the day, it still comes down to where you live and who you grow up with. While racial gaps have narrowed, class-based divides have deepened. But these patterns aren't fixed-opportunity can change, and it can change quickly."

Goldman's latest research focuses on the role marriage plays in social mobility. His paper, "Who Marries Whom? The Role of Segregation by Race and Class," was invited for revision at the American Economic Review and has already become something of a media darling, influential in recent reports in The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal.

"Why is marriage across race and class lines so rare? One possibility is that individuals have a preference for partners from their own race or class group. Alternatively, people may be open to marrying across group lines, but a lack of exposure to other groups prevents such marriages from forming," the paper posits in its introduction. It's these types of far-reaching insights into the most stubborn factors limiting social mobility that are the focus of Goldman's work.

Looking ahead, Goldman is pursuing several projects that build on his broader interest in economic mobility and place-based inequality. One study investigates whether students in high-poverty schools who received individualized support from a navigator ended up on stronger life trajectories. Another explores how growing up in high-crime neighborhoods affects long-term outcomes-and whether efforts to reduce crime can meaningfully improve children's life chances. He's also examining how key childhood resources, such as parental income and neighborhood quality, have become more unequally distributed across different parts of the country.

"Social mobility is a foundational promise of the American Dream, and my work and the work of Opportunity Insights has been about using big data to understand how it actually plays out," said Goldman. "The next step is to find solutions, and I think this field is really on the cusp of making important discoveries. It takes a long time to find out whether an intervention improves a child's outcomes later in life, and our job as researchers is to make those efforts more effective and more efficient."