This feature is part of an ongoing RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which highlights some of the research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.

While the race for the Republican presidential nomination has intensified between leading candidates Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio over the last few weeks, all three candidates have at least one thing in common: a plan to cut taxes. For decades, Republican policymakers across the nation have championed tax cuts for individuals and businesses alike as a means of invigorating a sluggish economy. But at what point did this ideology become central to the GOP’s platform?

Visiting Scholar Monica Prasad (Northwestern University) is working on a book that explores the origins of the tax-cut movement, looking at how the decline of progressive taxation in the U.S. contributed to the revitalization of the Republican Party in the aftermath of Watergate. She is researching how the decline of progressive taxation and an unwillingness on the part of the political system to tolerate high tax rates on the wealthy has contributed to rising inequality. Using recently released archival sources, she will focus on the importance of tax cuts to the conservative resurgence, an issue that has been understudied in previous literature.

In a new interview with the Foundation, Prasad explained the historical factors that led to the Republican Party’s modern-day embrace of tax cuts.

Q. Your current research examines the historical factors that led to the Republican Party making tax cuts a central part of their economic platform in the 1980s, a position that continues to this day. How did Republicans tend to address taxes prior to this point? Were business elites influential in pushing tax cuts to the fore of the GOP agenda?

The Roosevelt Institute and the Kauffman Foundation have jointly released a new e-book, The Good Economy, co-authored by Russell Sage Foundation trustee and Roosevelt Senior Fellow Bo Cutter, Kauffman Vice President Dane Stangler, and Council on Foreign Relations Adjunct Senior Fellow Robert Litan. The book explores different economic scenarios facing the United States and describes a future in which innovation could produce the strongest economic boom since the 1950s while also promoting broader opportunity and equity.

The Good Economy envisions an economic resurgence beginning in 2020 driven by factors such as the continued growth of freelancing platforms like Uber and Etsy coupled with the development of new advances like nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. The authors further forecast the rise of a new political dynamic as the federal government breaks free from political paralysis and cities and states serve as hubs of experimentation. However, they also caution that without a comprehensive overhaul of business, labor rights, government spending and other issues, such shifts would entail more risk and instability for workers.

“By 2040, our definitions of ‘work’ and ‘job’ may be very different,” said Cutter. “Changes in the economy could force average workers to become entrepreneurs, making use of new technologies and services to acquire skills and opportunities while taking on more responsibility for their own health care and retirement.” But, he added, “if they can manage the transition, they will be able to find more work even as more jobs become automated.”

On Thursday, March 3, Jennifer Lee (University of California, Irvine) and Min Zhou (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and University of California, Los Angeles), authors of the 2015 RSF book The Asian American Achievement Paradox, will give a talk at Yale University on the research from their book.

In The Asian American Achievement Paradox, Lee and Zhou offer a compelling account of the academic achievement of the children of Asian immigrants—which pundits have long attributed to unique cultural values. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the adult children of Chinese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees and survey data, Lee and Zhou bridge sociology and social psychology to correct this myth and explain how immigration laws, institutions, and culture interact to foster high achievement among certain Asian American groups.

The authors’ upcoming talk is sponsored by the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University and will begin at 4pm on Thursday, March 3.

The latest issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science contains an article by former Visiting Scholar Michael Hout (University of California, Berkeley), based on research partly funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. During his time at the Foundation, Hout studied trends in social mobility in the U.S. since the 1970s, looking in particular at the decline in upward social mobility and the rise of downward social mobility.

In his new report for the Annals, Hout examines the effects of the Great Recession, and of growing income inequality in general, on the psychological well-being of Americans. The abstract states:

Dozens of past studies document how affluent people feel somewhat better about life than middle-class people feel and much better than poor people do. New analyses of the General Social Surveys from 1974 to 2012 address questions in the literature regarding aggregate responses to hard times, whether the income-class relationship is linear or not, and whether inequality affects happiness. General happiness dropped significantly during the Great Recession, suggesting that the income-happiness relationship might also exist at the macro level. People with extremely low incomes are not as unhappy as a linear model expects, but there is no evidence of a threshold beyond which personal happiness stops increasing. Comparing happiness over the long term, the affluent were about as happy in 2012 as they were in the 1970s, but the poor were much less happy. Consequently, the gross happiness gap by income was about 30 percent bigger in 2012 than it was in the 1970s. A multivariate model shows that the net effect of income on happiness also increased significantly over time.

The Russell Sage Foundation has recently approved the following Presidential Authority awards in three program areas—Future of Work; Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration; and Social Inequality—as well as a conference for an upcoming issue of the RSF journal. The Foundation is also co-funding two new projects on the Affordable Care Act with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

RSF Journal Conference:

The Underground Gun Market
Philip J. Cook (Duke University) and Harold A. Pollack (University of Chicago)

For an upcoming issue of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, economist Philip J. Cook and public policy expert Harold A. Pollack will organize a symposium featuring nine invited articles based on the findings of the Multi-City Gun Project, a multi-disciplinary group of experts studying the sources of guns to criminal offenders.