Several RSF titles have recently received book awards for their distinguished contributions to the social sciences. In June, Unequal Time (2014) by Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel was named the winner of the Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship by the Organizations, Occupations, and Work (OOW) Section of the American Sociological Association. In Unequal Time, Clawson and Gerstel explore the ways in which social inequalities permeate the workplace and show how the schedules of some workers can shape the schedules of others in ways that exemplify and often exacerbate gender and class differences. Focusing on four occupations in the health sector—doctors, nurses, EMTs, and nursing assistants—the authors show how all of these workers experience the effects of schedule uncertainty but do so in very distinct ways for each occupation.

The OOW also awarded an honorable mention to Nancy DiTomaso for her RSF book The American Non-Dilemma (2013). In the book, DiTomaso draws from interviews with working, middle, and upper-class whites to show that while the vast majority of whites profess strong support for civil rights and equal opportunity regardless of race, they continue to pursue their own group-based advantage, especially in the labor market where whites tend to favor other whites in securing jobs protected from market competition. This “opportunity hoarding” leads to substantially improved life outcomes for whites due to their greater access to social resources from family, schools, churches, and other institutions with which they are engaged.

A new report by RSF grantee Robert A. Moffitt in the most recent issue of Demography journal explores the changes to the welfare system across the last several decades. Moffitt argues that although the system as a whole has expanded, financial support has evolved very differently for different demographic and economic groups, which may reflect long-held societal notions of which of the poor are "deserving" of aid and which are not. The report's abstract states:

Contrary to the popular view that the U.S. welfare system has been in a contractionary phase after the expansions of the welfare state in the 1960s, welfare spending resumed steady growth after a pause in the 1970s. However, although aggregate spending is higher than ever, there have been redistributions away from non-elderly and nondisabled families to families with older adults and to families with recipients of disability programs; from non-elderly, nondisabled single-parent families to married-parent families; and from the poorest families to those with higher incomes. These redistributions likely reflect long-standing, and perhaps increasing, conceptualizations by U.S. society of which poor are deserving and which are not.

New research co-funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts contains sobering new evidence on the lack of social mobility in the United States. In their report, authors David Grusky and Pablo Mitnik (Stanford University) note that approximately half of parental income advantages in the United States are passed on to children, which is among the lowest estimates of economic mobility yet produced.

The study, "Economic Mobility in the United States," provides the most comprehensive assessment to date of the intergenerational transmission of economic advantage. The report draws on a new data set from tax returns and other administrative sources to overcome limitations that hampered previous studies. These findings make clear that children raised in families that are far apart on the income ladder can expect markedly different economic futures. As Joe Pinsker writes about the report in the Atlantic, “This means that the amount of money one makes can be roughly predicted by how much money one’s parents made, and that only gets truer as one moves along the earnings spectrum.”

RSF president Sheldon Danziger stated, “The report documents that public policies must do more to level the playing field so that children from low-income families have greater opportunities to compete in the 21st century economy. Over recent decades, the rising income and wealth of affluent parents have allowed them to increase investments in their children, from day care through college. At the same time, wages have stagnated for most workers and low-income families have struggled to pay for routine expenses.”

This report utilizes the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) to measure the share of economic advantage that is passed on to children. The IGE is typically between zero and one, with an IGE of zero implying that children from families of different socioeconomic status have the same expected income as one another, with no inherited income advantage or disadvantage. An IGE of one, on the other hand, implies that parental advantages are fully passed on.

The Russell Sage Foundation is pleased to announce the establishment of a Visiting Journalist Fellowship for projects related to the Foundation's mission of the "improvement of social and living conditions in the United States." The growth of economic inequality and its consequences, inequities in educational achievement and attainment, the social, political and economic impacts of immigration, and recent racial tensions over urban policing, are all examples of topics addressed by journalists that are central to RSF’s core programs.

Visiting Journalists will have an opportunity to work in residence at the Foundation for a period of 1-3 months and to interact with resident Visiting Scholars who might help inform the development of their projects.

The Foundation is now accepting Visiting Journalist applications for the 2016-17 year, with a deadline of September 1, 2015 at 11:59pm EST.

RSF author and former Visiting Scholar Jennifer Lee (University of California, Irvine) recently visited New Zealand to deliver a keynote address at the Population Association of New Zealand conference. During her time in Wellington, she participated in an interview at the U.S. Embassy and discussed diversity and population trends in America.

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.

During her time in residence at the Foundation, Elizabeth Shermer (Loyola) has worked on a book that examines the origins of the contemporary crisis in public higher education. She argues that contrary to popular belief, state universities have always been subject to market forces. Shermer finds that there was never enough government funding to create a geographically-uniform system of mass higher education, and that as a result, public universities have long been influenced by private sector interests.

In a new interview with the Foundation, Shermer discussed the complex history of the rise of public education in the U.S. and recommended policies for expanding access to higher education for low-income students.

Q. Your current research challenges the popular myth of a "golden era" of public higher education by demonstrating how, from the very beginning, state schools experienced a number of funding problems and relied on different public-private partnerships to grow. Can you briefly flesh out the history of one state school to illustrate how public higher education's growth always required ties to a variety of different businesses and institutions?