Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Sociology and Public Policy
Devah was known as a builder of communities...This was especially true for the Inequality & Social Policy program, which Devah led from 2014 until just a few weeks before her death on November 2, 2018.
In reflecting on Devah's scholarship and leadership, we would like to share a bit about the remarkable community Devah has brought together in the Inequality & Social Policy program and what makes it so special.
At the heart of the program is a group of PhD students drawn from across the university's social science doctoral programs. We invite you to take a look at their work » Meet the PhD Scholars
Reflected in the students, you will see the values that motivated Devah's commitment to her students and this enterprise: that of developing careful and creative social science research to help make the world a better place.
With gratitude and deep appreciation for all that Devah has done, we miss her dearly.
Based on her PhD dissertation, which won the American Sociological Association's best dissertation award, Devah Pager's seminal work investigated the racial and economic consequences of large scale imprisonment for contemporary U.S. labor markets. Read an excerpt »
Devah Pager published widely on discrimination and racial stratification in education, employment, and the criminal justice system, and the use of field experiments to study discrimination. Author's preprints of all journal articles may be viewed on Devah's faculty website.
By Helen Ho, PhD candidate in Public Policy
and Rebecca Goldstein, PhD candidate in Government
In her most recent work, Devah and colleague Bruce Western of Columbia University—joined by Harvard doctoral students Rebecca Goldstein and Helen Ho—launched a field experiment in 2017 to examine the long-term consequences of legal debt on social, economic, and criminal justice outcomes. Helen Ho and Becca Goldstein, both Malcolm Wiener PhD Scholars in Poverty and Justice, continue Devah's work with the study team in this ongoing research. Read more »
VIDEO TRIBUTE — HARVARD SOCIOLOGY DANCES FOR DEVAH
Smiles and tears as Harvard Sociology PhD students, faculty, and staff came together to say good-bye to Devah in a music video celebrating her joy for life. Filmed and shared with Devah on October 30.
The inaugural Stone Lecture in Economic Inequality, organized by Devah Pager, brought Thomas Piketty to the JFK Jr. Forum at Harvard Kennedy School in March 2018. The Stone Lecture also marked the public launch of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone PhD Scholars initiative and the introduction of the Stone Senior Scholar affiliates. Learn more about each below.
Photos by John Werner (top) and Martha Stewart. From the inaugural Stone Lecture by Thomas Piketty in the JFK Jr. Forum at Harvard Kennedy School, March 30, 2018.
THE INAUGURAL JAMES M. AND CATHLEEN D. STONE LECTURE ON ECONOMIC INEQUALITY
Rising Inequality
and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict
Thomas Piketty
L'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Paris School of Economics.
The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone PhD Scholars
in Inequality and Wealth Concentration
The Malcolm Hewitt Wiener PhD Scholars
in Poverty and Justice
The inaugural Stone Lecture in March 2018 served as the public launch for the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone PhD Scholar fellowships. These new fellowships are designed to cultivate original and rigorous scholarship on problems of inequality and wealth concentration and on public policies to address them. A distinctive emphasis of the Stone initiative is to develop new research on top-end inequality and wealth concentration, in particular, so that we may better understand the nature of these trends at the top of the distribution and their economic, political, and social consequences.
We are pleased to introduce the new James M. and Cathleen D. Stone PhD Scholars in Inequality and Wealth Concentration. They are complemented by a group of Malcolm Hewitt Wiener PhD Scholars in Poverty and Justice.
Devah Pager was instrumental in assembling the Stone Senior Scholars, a multidisciplinary group of national faculty affiliates who would bring distinctive insights and perspectives from their own work on issues of income inequality, wealth, and mobility. Many are focused specifically on the nature and consequences of income and wealth concentration at the very top of the distribution.
MARIANNE BERTRAND
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
RAJ CHETTY
Economics, Stanford University (as of spring 2018). Now Harvard University.
JANET C. GORNICK
Political Science and Sociology, The Graduate Center, CUNY; Director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality and for the US Office of LIS.
DAVID B. GRUSKY
Sociology, Stanford University; and Director, Center on Poverty and Inequality.
GABRIEL ZUCMAN
Economics, University of California, Berkeley; and Co-Director, World Inequality Database
STONE PHD SCHOLARS LAUNCH
$2.5M Gift from the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation Will Enhance Efforts to Address Wealth Concentration and Inequality
March 27, 2018
Harvard Kennedy School has received a $2.5 million gift from the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation to support new and ongoing work to address wealth concentration and the broader problems of inequality. The gift supports the research and outreach efforts at the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, which serves as a nexus for work on inequality across the university. Read more »
“
The accelerating concentration of wealth at the pinnacle of the wealth distribution is not propitious for the well-being of our country.
The concentration and sequestration of wealth at the top can interfere with economic growth and diminish the benefits of mobility. Excesses of concentration and hereditary wealth tend to weaken the middle class and dampen prospects for the poor. Just as important, this trend threatens to undermine the democratic pluralism in politics that has helped create this country’s impressive record of success.
—Jim Stone
”
INEQUALITY & SOCIAL POLICY PROSEMINAR
Meet the Proseminar faculty
Devah was deeply committed to her students and advisees in the Inequality & Social Policy proseminar, which she continued to teach through early fall 2018. This is the three-semester team-taught course sequence taken by all PhD Scholars in the program.
Devah was delighted to be joined for the 2018-2019 academic year by Jennifer Hochschild, who co-taught the fall term, and Jason Furman and Michael Norton in the spring. Maya Sen returned this year to lead the third-term workshop (fall 2018).
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD
Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard College Professor, and the Chair of the Department of Government.
JASON FURMAN
Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.
MICHAEL NORTON
Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a member of Harvard's Behavioral Insights Group.
MAYA SEN
Associate Professor at Harvard Kennedy School (political scientist).
WELCOME NEW AND RETURNING FACULTY
Meet new faculty members
Devah welcomed six faculty colleagues to the Inequality & Social Policy program in fall 2018 and looked forward to introducing them to the community. They bring exciting new work in the areas of of criminal justice, race, education, gender, immigration, economic mobility, social, spatial, and temporal processes that lead to inequality, social inequality in comparative perspective, and political representation.
DESMOND ANG
Assistant Professor at Harvard Kennedy School. Applied economist working at the intersection of race, politics and government.
RAJ CHETTY RETURNS TO HARVARD Harvard Gazette
Raj Chetty returns to Harvard as the William A. Ackman Professor of Economics and Director of Opportunity Insights.
JOSCHA LEGEWIE
Assistant Professor of Sociology. Social inequality and stratification, education, race/ethnicity, quantitative methods, urban sociology, and computational social science. The social, spatial, and temporal processes that lead to inequality.
ELLIS MONK
Assistant Professor of Sociology. Ethnoracial categorization, inequality, and stratification in comparative perspective; health; sociology of the body; political sociology; social psychology; cognition; theory; and Brazil.
BENJAMIN SCHNEER
Assistant Professor at Harvard Kennedy School. Political scientist of American politics, with a focus on political representation. How citizens express their preferences, how government responds to them, and what may shape and distort these processes.
A JAMES M. and CATHLEEN D. STONE PHD SCHOLARS EVENT
Global Inequality
New findings from the World Inequality Report
Lucas Chancel
Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab, Paris School of Economics.
Dani Rodrik
Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy, Harvard Kennedy School.
A presentation and discussion of the World Inequality Report 2018, edited by Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman (Harvard University Press, 2018).
Lucas Chancel also led a smaller workshop during his visit to the Harvard Kennedy School to highlight resources available for researchers and upcoming plans for the World Inequality Lab.
Lucas Chancel and colleagues at the World Inequality Lab are organizing this year's Eighth Meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ).
Different Ways of Not Having It All: Constructing Strategies of Gender, Work, and Care in an Age of Insecurity
Kathleen Gerson, Professor of Sociology and Collegiate Professor of Arts and Science, New York University.
PIER SEMINAR
Oct 30 2018
Reducing Inequality Through Dynamic Complementarity: Evidence from Head Start and Public School Spending
Kirabo Jackson, Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, Northwestern University.
Video | Paper (New!) American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (2019)
Sponsored by the Partnering in Education Research (PIER) doctoral fellowship program, part of the Center for Education Policy Research directed by Thomas J. Kane, Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and Economics, at Harvard University.
Co-sponsored by the Inequality & Social Policy program.
Nov 5, 2018
The Government-Citizen Disconnect
Suzanne Mettler, The John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions, Cornell University.
Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy
Harvard Kennedy School
Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy
79 JKF Street (Box 103)
Cambridge MA 02138
