The New York Times and TIME magazine recently covered a new study by Fabian T. Pfeffer, Sheldon Danziger, and Robert Schoeni, released as part of the Russell Sage Foundation’s Recession Trends collaboration with the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. In the study, the authors explore the extent to which the Great Recession altered the level and distribution of American families’ wealth. Their research concludes that for typical American households, net worth fell by about a third between 2003 and 2013. Yet, as Anna Bernasek notes in the NYT, “The Russell Sage study also examined net worth at the 95th percentile. (For households at that level, 95 percent of the population had less wealth.) It found that for this well-do-do slice of the population, household net worth increased 14 percent over the same 10 years.” In other words, the study uncovers not just the losses sustained by American households during the Recession, but also the troubling and still-growing increase in wealth inequality in the U.S.

The New York Times also recently highlighted new research by Andrew Cherlin, a former Visiting Scholar and the author of Labor’s Love Lost (to be published by the Russell Sage Foundation in December 2014). In his forthcoming book, Cherlin offers a new historical assessment of the rise and fall of working-class families in America, demonstrating how momentous social and economic transformations have contributed to the collapse of this once-stable social class and what this seismic cultural shift means for the nation’s future. As Cherlin explained to the Times, in the 50s and 60, most working class families were sustained by a male breadwinner. But the collapse of industrial blue-collar jobs and the increase in the number of women in the workforce have eroded this family structure.

A panel session at the upcoming American Sociological Association (ASA) will feature a discussion of the 2014 Russell Sage Foundation publication, Legacies of the War on Poverty, co-edited by RSF president Sheldon Danziger and Martha J. Bailey (University of Michigan). The book—published on the fiftieth anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of an unconditional war on poverty—evaluates the success of the anti-poverty programs established during Johnson’s administration, many of which still form the basis of the social safety net in the U.S. today.

While some accounts portray the War on Poverty as a costly experiment that failed, the contributors featured in Legacies draw from fifty years of empirical evidence to show that this view is too simplistic and document many ways that War on Poverty programs improved the educational attainment, incomes and health of the poor and the elderly.

The panelists at the upcoming ASA talk are Legacies co-editor Sheldon Danziger and contributors Kathleen McGarry (UCLA) and Harry Holzer (Georgetown), in conversation with David B. Grusky (Stanford).

Dear Colleagues: I am writing to solicit your personal interest in and your help in identifying outstanding faculty candidates, especially those who are members of groups that may have been under-represented in the social sciences, for the Russell Sage Foundation's Visiting Scholars Program. This competitive program provides a unique opportunity for both junior and senior faculty members from all of the social, economic and behavioral sciences to spend a year in residence at the Foundation pursuing research that is relevant to the Foundation's signature program areas—Behavioral Economics, Cultural Contact, the Future of Work, Immigration Research, and Social Inequality.

The program has operated for almost three decades. Past participants (I was a visiting scholar in 2002-2003) have described the experience as invaluable, productive and stimulating. Each year, we select a class of 16-18 scholars, from some 150 to 200 applicants. The application requires a letter describing the intended project and a current CV. Click here to read more about the program's eligibility requirements.

Several new research projects in the Russell Sage Foundation’s Social Inequality and the Future of Work programs were funded at the Foundation’s June meeting of the Board of Trustees.

The Foundation’s Social Inequality program examines the social and political consequences of rising economic inequality. Recently, the program has turned to in-depth examinations of public education and intergenerational social mobility, funding projects that examine access to early education, growing wealth disparities in the U.S., and the effects of household wealth on child development, among others. The following projects were funded under the Social Inequality program:

The 109th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) will take place in San Francisco, from August 16 to 19, 2014. The theme this year is "Hard Times: The Impact of Economic Inequality on Families and Individuals." ASA President and former RSF Visiting Scholar and grantee Annette Lareau and the 2014 Program Committee have put together an exciting program, with over 600 sessions highlighting social science research that documents the breadth and depth of economic inequality and its consequences.

Among the twenty-one books that will be discussed at the Author Meets Critics Sessions are two Russell Sage publications: