Far from being a cult concern, inequality is now a mainstream issue.
Not so long ago, the typical leftist would frequently complain that scholars, politicians, and pundits were largely indifferent to the spectacular takeoff in income inequality and the persistence of other extreme forms of inequality. This complaint was warranted: However much those on the left railed about inequality, pretty much no one was listening.
But that was then. Today, far from being a cult concern, inequality is a mainstream topic featured in all the mainstream outlets. It’s hard to pick up a newspaper, read a blog, or listen to the radio without learning about some new piece of research on poverty or inequality.
Who is poor? Who is rich? How much discrimination is there?
Given all of this research, one might reasonably ask whether enough is enough, whether perhaps it’s time to restrain the poverty and inequality research machine. Don’t we know enough already? Isn’t it high time to stop researching and begin doing something? Aren’t we just rediscovering what’s already known?
In answering these questions, it’s useful to sort out what we know and don’t know about poverty and inequality. On the positive side of the ledger, we’ve made great strides in understanding such topics as (1) why some people are well-off and others are in poverty, (2) the role of discrimination and segregation in creating labor market disadvantage, and (3) the effects of education on labor market outcomes.
This is of course but a sampling of the field’s successes, but it makes it clear that we’ve made the most headway understanding the individual-level processes behind poverty and inequality. Who is poor? Who is rich? How much discrimination is there? We know far more about these types of questions than we ever did before.
By contrast, when we turn to the idiographic task of understanding systemic change, the failures are sometimes more impressive than the successes. The takeoff in income inequality, one of the most consequential developments of our time, was largely unpredicted. The resilience of school segregation came as something of a surprise to most social scientists. The sudden “stalling out” of long-standing declines in gender inequality remains poorly understood. The equally sudden evaporation of opposition to gay marriage and other types of gay rights was unimaginable just five years ago. The lightning-fast rise and fall of one of the first anti-inequality movements in contemporary U.S. history (the Occupy Wall Street movement) is likewise a puzzle.
If the field has therefore performed less impressively in understanding the dynamics of systemic change, this is hardly a distinctive feature of the poverty and inequality field itself. Across all fields of social science, the dynamics of systemic change have never fully yielded to science, an obvious implication of having but one world and one case to explain.
So here’s my (admittedly banal) prediction: It’s unlikely that we’ll see any near-term decline in the amount of research on poverty and inequality. Although all research topics are of course subject to academic fad and fashion, there’s just too much happening on the poverty and inequality front, much of it still puzzling, to suggest that poverty and inequality research is in imminent decline.
Nor should we want a reduction in the amount of such research. The social and human cost of failing to understand the sources of systemic change (e.g., the Great Recession) obviously swamps the rounding-error cost of research on that change. Even in the individual-level domain, where we’ve argued that social science has been most successful, there is still much that we don’t understand. The cost of this ignorance (e.g., making poor policy decisions) again swamps the rounding-error cost of funding research that reduces our ignorance. The simple upshot: there's no need to ask deep questions about the usefulness of poverty and inequality research because its direct and immediate policy benefits clearly exceed the costs of funding it.
David B. Grusky is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, Director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, and series editor for he Stanford Press series, Studies in Social Inequality. He is also coauthor or coeditor of several Stanford Press books, including The New Gilded Age, Mobility and Inequality, and Occupational Ghettos.
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