Interviewing experts wasn’t enough

Six years ago, Sahil Chinoy was a new hire at The New York Times, working at the intersection of journalism and data analysis. At 23, he was a graphics editor at the paper of record.

Crunching numbers, making charts, and speaking week by week to experts about party ideology, police brutality, or facial recognition: It was a dream job for a curious person.

And it wasn’t enough. “I’d want to read the underlying paper,” Chinoy said. “You’re reading this research on the way home, on the subway, and feeling like, ‘I just don’t have the energy to really understand this — I’d have to do this full time.’”

In retrospect it’s clear to Chinoy how he was borne along — and repeatedly redirected — by his particular curiosity: about systems, abstractions, how things work.

He came to UC Berkeley in 2013 as an aspiring aeronautical engineer, but the shine quickly wore off. “When I went to my first class, all the other kids were super excited to get into the machine shop,” he laughed. “And I was like, ‘Oh, no: The part of this that I like is thinking about building things.’”

So engineering gave way to physics, and physics was in turn displaced by economics. After his year at the Times, he joined Harvard’s Economics Department as a doctoral candidate. He’s set to graduate later this month.

In papers for the National Bureau of Economic Research, he and his co-authors have studied big datasets in search of the sociopolitical patterns that structure American life, such as the influence of “zero-sum” thinking on American policy preferences and how military service in World War I drove Black veterans into the NAACP.

Along the way Chinoy may have benefited from the winding route he took to Harvard, drawing on advanced math, an interest in American politics, and the journalistic instinct for the timely investigation.

Chinoy’s distinctive approach has won him admirers among faculty collaborators and mentors.

Stefanie Stantcheva, his main adviser, is herself a rising star; she was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal for the top American economists under 40 just last month.

In written remarks, Stantcheva said it’s been “such a joy working with Sahil. He is super curious about new issues, but then also engages with them on a deep level.”

Vincent Pons of the Business School praised the “curiosity and ambition” Chinoy brought to their paper on neighborhood roots and political affiliation.

“Sometimes there are very big questions that you’re interested in, but it’s very unclear how you might study those questions,” Pons said. “Sahil is someone who — once he has a big question he’s after — he’ll find the data, and find the strategy, that is required to provide a convincing answer.”

For Chinoy’s latest job-market paper, which found “substantial segregation” on the basis of ideology in American workplaces, that meant yoking together two enormous digital databases — voter rolls and the networking site LinkedIn. The work created a political-economic window on more than 34 million Americans, likely the largest such dataset ever compiled.

He and co-author Martin Koenen found that not only are there conservative- and liberal-aligned firms, but voters will measurably forgo some pay to work at a firm that reflects their values — or to avoid joining one that doesn’t.

Chinoy acknowledges that the interdependence of work and politics prompted decades of economic scrutiny before he ever came to Harvard. “A lot of what I am doing is I think addressing some of these long-standing questions with really modern econometric tools and with big data.”

Three papers later, the work has helped him to a nuanced view of personal politics at work.

“In this research, I kind of seesaw between thinking that politics is now this defining form of identity, that for a lot of people shapes all kinds of decisions,” Chinoy said. “On the other hand, the labor market is also about people who want a paycheck, who want to put food on the table. And when a job pays less than another job — even if it’s more politically aligned with your views — that matters, too.”

For now, that’s the big question preoccupying Chinoy: what he calls “the interplay between political identity and political behavior and some of these economic forces,” like the labor market, immigration patterns, and racial coalitions.

And that interest has prompted one more evolution in Chinoy’s professional career. Trained as an economist, he’ll join the political science department at Stanford in 2026.

In the meantime, he has a postdoctoral appointment at Yale’s Program on Ethics, Politics and Economics, which will keep him in Cambridge for one more year with his partner, a public defender.

But first comes Commencement, which the Chinoys — his parents, his brother, and a couple of cousins — will attend ahead of a celebratory weekend trip to the Berkshires.

Asked if he can share any lessons for our polarized political moment, Chinoy remains — characteristically — in the interrogative mood.

“We started getting really good public opinion data in the mid-20th century, around the 1950s. And so we chart the rise of polarization from what might have been a particularly peaceful time in American politics, or at least, where there was less open conflict between different factions. Perhaps that was the anomaly.”