The EconomistMay 16th 2020 United States 212
1“It’s like Rousseau [in ‘The Social Con-
tract’]: ‘Man is born free and everywhere he
is in chains.’ We just remove the chain of
neighbourhood. And it’s not that simple,”
says James Heckman, an economist at the
University of Chicago, who has grown criti-
cal of the research and the implications
drawn from it. Mr Heckman, who won a
Nobel prize for work on teasing out cause
and effect from messy, real-world data,
thinks there is more statistical uncertainty
in the neighbourhood-mobility findings
than is widely recognised. A working paper
by Magne Mogstad, another economist at
the University of Chicago, and his col-
leagues argues that the “noise”, or random
fluctuation, in Mr Chetty’s data means “it is
not possible to draw firm conclusions
about which counties in the United States
have high or low values” of upward mobil-
ity from the poorest 25% of households.
Mr Heckman acknowledges that there
are clear differences in mobility according
to neighbourhood. But the ultimate drivers
could lie in family structure, parenting
habits, exposure to crime or the quality of
schooling. All these are difficult to derive
from American tax-return data.
Pundits take the research on “neigh-
bourhood effects” as evidence that “zip-
code is destiny”. Mr Heckman bristles at
that. It overlooks the fact that Asians and
black women do fairly well in mobility rel-
ative to whites. “It diverts attention away
from other plausible explanations for why
African-Americans are not doing well. Put
discrimination on the table...but family
structure is the one thing that is just off the
table in American society,” he says.
That topic has a history of descending
into ugly spats about the personal culpabil-
ity of the poor, which may ward off social
scientists. Mr Heckman sees his own re-
search—tracking long-term outcomes for
children and parents randomly assigned to
a high-quality early-learning scheme—as
strong evidence that families can become
more stable and that disadvantaged chil-
dren can be helped without having to
move. The point is not to yearn for a return
to “shotgun marriages”, he says, but to en-
courage stable cohabiting relationships.
This debate matters not just because
two prominent economists disagree, but
because they suggest different methods for
tackling the urgent problem of intergener-
ational immobility. Mr Chetty’s experi-
mental work on the primacy of place will be
an important test of his theories, yet it also
has a limit on its scale: every disadvantaged
American plainly cannot be moved to op-
portunity. Mr Heckman’s project of en-
couraging early-childhood education has
some scaling questions, too: could every
child in America receive a programme as
intensive as the ones he studies? For now,
the answer, as with all messy scientific de-
bates, is to let the experiments proceed. 7T
he separationof powers, the foun-
ders’ bulwark against tyranny, is not
what it might seem. As James Madison ex-
plained in the Federalist PapersNo. 47, the
idea is not to keep the legislative, executive
and judicial departments “absolutely sepa-
rate and distinct”. Rather, Madison wrote,
each must exercise a measure of “control”
or “agency” over its fellow branches. Nego-
tiating the overlapping portions of the
Venn diagram has often fallen to the judi-
ciary, as it did on May 12th, when the Su-
preme Court took up two challenges to
President Donald Trump’s quest to keep his
taxes and other financial records secret.
Mr Trump is the first president since
Richard Nixon to refuse to share at least
some tax information with the American
people. But in April 2019, with the Demo-
crats back in control of the House of Repre-
sentatives, three congressional commit-
tees subpoenaed years of papers from Mr
Trump’s banks and his accounting firm. A
few months later Cyrus Vance, Manhattan’s
district attorney, sought similar records for
a grand-jury investigation into Mr Trump’s
alleged hush-money payoffs to an adult
film star and a Playboy model before the
election in 2016. Lower courts rejected Mr
Trump’s pleas to block the subpoenas, leav-
ing the nine justices with the final say.
The first pair of cases, argued by tele-
phone (the court is not meeting in person
during the pandemic), concerned House
subpoenas to Capital One and DeutscheBank, two of Mr Trump’s lenders, and Ma-
zars usa, his accountant. The Oversight
Committee had demanded documents to
help it consider revising government eth-
ics laws. The Intelligence and Financial
Services Committees said they wanted to
investigate money-laundering and foreign
interference in the 2016 election.
Patrick Strawbridge, Mr Trump’s lawyer,
described the House efforts as a “dragnet”.
He seemed to raise the eyebrows of Chief
Justice John Roberts, though, when he cast
doubt on all congressional oversight of
presidents. “Quite frankly,” Mr Strawbridge
said, “the House has limited powers to reg-
ulate the presidency itself.” Jeff Wall, sup-
porting Mr Trump from the Department of
Justice, added that the subpoenas were de-
signed to “undermine the president” and
the House had not “even come close” to ex-
plaining why it needs the documents.
The House’s lawyer, Douglas Letter,
seemed to have precedent on his side. In
1927 the court observed that the “power to
secure needed information...has long been
treated as an attribute of the power to legis-
late.” And in 1974 it unanimously ordered
Nixon to comply with a subpoena for his
White House tapes. But when pressed to
identify a limit on Congress’s subpoena
power, Mr Letter faltered. Justice Samuel
Alito, one of the court’s most skilful ques-
tioners, backed him into a Socratic corner.
There is “really no protection”, he asked,
“preventing the harassment of a presi-NEW YORK
The Supreme Court may issue split decisions on the president’s financial recordsDonald Trump’s taxesOn the money