The Inequality Podcast

In societies that celebrate meritocracy, success is most admired when it appears to have been earned. So it is perhaps unsurprising that those with high status would emphasize their humble beginnings and everyday tastes. Our guests documented this dynamic in Britain, where they observed that today’s elites often contrast themselves with the openly privileged elites of generations past. But does th...

We often turn to social identities, such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status, to better understand inequality across groups. But what if we’ve overlooked an identity hiding in plain sight? The way we speak, including our language and accent, shapes how others judge us, sometimes without them even realizing it. Our guest today has contributed foundational research on when language bias first...

In many corners, a large and growing global population is cause for worry. More people may create greater problems for the environment, for humanity’s food supply, for gender equity, and more. Today, however, societies face the possibility of a different problem: With birth rates in decline, the global population is growing at a slower rate. Sometime this century, many demographers say, the popula...

In the United States, the most well-resourced universities largely admit the highest-scoring students, while the least-resourced serve students with the lowest scores. But if individual achievement is shaped not only by ability, but also by family resources, school quality, parental education, and other circumstances, what are the inequality implications of a higher education system that concentra...

Meritocracy was meant to dislodge the old aristocratic elite: In its most idealized version, a society’s richest would earn their riches, as opposed to merely inheriting them. But what happens when these new meritocratic elites begin using their wealth to give their children unfair advantages? If meritocracy can be corrupted like that, then what does that say about it as an ideal societies are str...

It is easy to regard economic ideas as something akin to laws of nature. In reality, every economic idea has a human history, a process through which it was devised, debated, and refined by economists — a group as subject to human nature as any other. Our guest today has spent a career studying how economic thought has evolved, including whether inequality within the field has affected economic th...

Over the past two decades, addressing income and wealth inequality has become a bigger and bigger priority for policymakers and researchers across the world. But have advocates focused on it too much? Our guest today argues that societies should de-emphasize inequality reduction and instead pursue other policies that would lift living standards. Lane Kenworthy is a sociologist at the University of...

Americans have long been susceptible to certain myths about poverty, including that individuals become poor because of choices, as opposed to larger societal forces. This way of thinking has consequences, particularly at the level of policymaking. Our guest today has done foundational work challenging these persistent myths, as well as diagnosing what it takes for our political institutions to mea...

Critics of meritocracy often emphasize the ways merit-based thinking can justify grossly unequal outcomes, such as wide gaps in pay between rank-and-file workers and CEOs. Indeed, to some meritocratic thinkers, a sought-after executive receiving an eight-figure salary is simply a skilled worker getting their just deserts. But our guest today advocates for a different conception of meritocracy, one...

It is a simple but persuasive idea: In a world of scarcity, rewards like jobs and pay should be distributed based on ability and effort, not birthright, connections, ways of living, wealth, and so on. Meritocracy, framed this way, may sound utterly uncontroversial. Yet the idea has its fair share of critics, who argue that “merit” tends to accrue to those lucky enough to have well-heeled, well-con...

Beginning in the 1980s, a new political order led policymakers to prize economic efficiency, often at the expense of public goods. What has followed, our guest argues, has been a withdrawal of ethics from policy making, as well as an “erosion of kindness.” Our guest proposes a different ethos, one that hearkens back to a time before the pursuit of efficiency blinded us to other essential human val...

From Adam Smith’s pin factory to Henry Ford’s assembly line, specialization has long connoted a modern, efficient economy. Within this paradigm, workers’ jobs become repetitive but, ultimately, entail a narrow scope of tasks. So why, in today’s ultra-optimized economy, are so many supposedly specialized workers juggling so many wide and varied responsibilities? Michelle Jackson is a sociologist at...

It is no secret that the power of American unions has waned since the middle of the 20th century. Their downturn has had far-reaching consequences: As the threat of organized labor recedes, employers may feel less pressure to offer concessions. Our guest today has done significant work studying the decline of the labor movement and its repercussions for workers, unionized or not. Few are better po...

Inequality is often framed in terms of a binary: rich and poor, haves and have nots. But inequality between groups — based on gender, class, race, and so on — must be understood alongside inequalities within particular groups, at particular intersections of identity. Our guest today has contributed foundational work to this intellectual framework. She has also enriched our understanding of how Ame...

To a large degree, the levels of inequality present in the United States intensified in the 1980s and 1990s. Starting in those decades, the poorest Americans began facing new threats, such as the “reforms” made to social welfare programs and the rise of mass incarceration. Our guest today has spent 30 years studying how politics and policy have shaped the lives of America’s poor, and his new book...

We all belong to networks. Whether in the boardroom or the barroom, human beings use networks to try to achieve their goals. But not all networks are created equal, and so access to them (or the lack thereof) can drive inequality. At the same time, the networks with which we identify most — such as friends, family and colleagues — are often not the connections that prove most decisive. Rather, as...

Among ancient civilizations, Rome inspires a special kind of fascination in the Western World. While the parallels between society now versus then are often overstated, we nevertheless can better understand ourselves by endeavoring to understand those who lived 2,000 years ago. Our guest’s work explores one facet of Roman life that reverberates in the way we live today: the surprisingly sophistica...

Across three seasons of The Inequality Podcast , thinkers from a range of disciplines have discussed how their work helps us understand inequality. Given the breadth and depth of the research featured, it is difficult to believe that the subject was once an afterthought in economics. For our 50th episode, we present a scholar whose groundbreaking ideas have proven integral to the study of inequali...

As part of the current immigration crackdown, federal agents have turned to profiling, making stops on the basis of occupation or perceived ethnicity. In a system where confirming legal status can take days or weeks, agents are finding shortcuts in stereotypes. Aside from the dubious constitutionality of these stops, the assumptions behind these tactics raise questions: What makes someone look ill...

Immigration has once again taken center stage in the United States. While the federal government’s crackdown continues to unfold, the ideas driving immigration politics are far from new. Concerns about economic competition and cultural assimilation would have been familiar to Americans a century ago. Yet research from our guests demonstrates that many of the commonly held beliefs about immigrants...

There is an old cliche about imagining the end of capitalism. But explaining the rise of capitalism presents its own challenges. Human beings have congregated in marketplaces for millennia. When did simple barter and trade tip into what we call capitalism? And why did that particular system conquer the world? Answering such questions requires an interdisciplinary approach, and perhaps there is no...

Economics as a discipline holds particular authority among the social sciences. The field owes its heft in part to the sophistication of its methods and models, both of which seem to grow ever more intricate. But what if in its quest for more complex techniques, mainstream economics is overlooking basic yet essential questions: For one, what is the economy? Jonathan Levy is a historian at Sciences...

With the university closed for its winter recess, we are sharing a favorite recording from the Stone Center’s archives. It is a live panel discussion about Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea , a book by Dartmouth history professor Darrin McMahon. The book is an intellectual feast, spanning centuries and bursting with insight about humanity’s quest to realize one of its highest, most fraught...

Over the past century, women’s roles in society have been transformed. It is straightforward enough to list changes in norms — around marriage, sex, jobs, and more. What is less obvious is how these updated norms have reshaped economies. Relationships have shifted between men and women, between women and their workplaces, and between the state and the family. The challenge now is evaluating the su...

Over the past several decades, American schools have improved significantly. The drastic gaps in achievement and funding that defined the early-to-mid 20th century have lessened, yielding an education system that, while not perfect, is far better than it was a generation or two ago. Even so, these gaps remain most pronounced for the students who start school with the fewest advantages, and researc...