New Directions for Research on Economic Inequality

Determining the social consequences of rising economic inequality has turned out to be a daunting scientific task. There is abundant circumstantial evidence that rising economic inequality may do real social damage, both short and long term. But pinning down these effects is not easy. Cross-national comparisons show ample correlations between economic inequality and social ills like crime, poor health, low education, and sluggish mobility. But countries that differ in inequality also differ in so many other ways that it is very difficult to draw clear inferences about what is causing what. Similarly, as economic inequality has risen in the U.S., inequality has also increased along many social dimensions, among them, single parenthood, school readiness, college completion, and political participation. But this rough historical coincidence in the rise of these inequalities is hardly enough to establish causation. More subtle, long-term effects, such as the way increasing inequality may be undermining institutions like the public school system or the democratic political system, are even more difficult to establish.

Harvard sociologist Bruce Western, working in conjunction with his colleagues at the Kennedy School of Government, Christopher Jencks and Kathryn Edin, is organizing a conference in the fall that will bring together twenty leading inequality researchers across four disciplines to take stock of current research on the effects of rising economic inequality and attempt to develop an agenda for future research. The conference will concern itself with five principal questions: What has, and has not, been learned over the past two decades of research on rising inequality? What do we know about the effects of the different types of economic inequality (for instance, upper tail vs. lower tail) that have unfolded in different historical patterns in the U.S. over the past forty years? How can we develop and test more specific theories of the likely channels through which economic inequality influences different social outcomes? And, how can new empirical strategies and data sources be developed to increase the power of our tests and the precision of our estimates of the effects of economic inequality?