Bloomberg View | Cass R. Sunstein column urges progressives and conservatives to escape their respective echo chambers by reading the best of each otther's work. Here he recommends five for conservatives, including Scarcity: Why Having Less Means So Much, by Sendhil Mullainathan (Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics) and Eldar Shafir (Princeton University).

"Mullainathan and Shafir demonstrate that these diverse forms of scarcity have something important in common: They take over our minds, leaving us with limited “bandwidth.”...Mullainathan and Shafir show why many public policy initiatives, which impose “bandwidth taxes” (for example, by making people fill out complex forms to receive financial assistance), turn out to be unhelpful and even counterproductive."... Read more about Five Books to Change Conservatives' Minds

FiveThirtyEight | Four reasons why HUD and housing policy matter—for poverty, homeownership and affordability, and in fighting discrimination and segregation. Cites research by Matthew Desmond, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard, and notes that Desmond's work was instrumental in getting eviction-related questions added to the 2017 American Housing Survey. 

Harvard Gazette | Bruce Western, Professor of Sociology and Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy, Vincent Schiraldi, Senior Research Fellow with the Malcolm Wiener Center's Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and Judge Nancy Gertner, Senior Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, relate their experience with criminal justice policy in a seminar aimed at reducing the country's bloated prison population. 

The Atlantic—CityLab | Draws from work by economists Ray Fisman, Boston University, and Michael Luca, Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School. Their article, "Fixing Discrimination in Online Marketplaces," featured in last month's roundup, appears in the Harvard Business Review.

The JFK Jr Forum  | Vivek H. Murthy, United States Surgeon General, joined Amitabh Chandra, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy, at the JFK Jr. Forum for a conversation on America's healthcare issues relating to opioid addiction, gun violence, and changes to healthcare laws under the new administration. Co-sponsored by the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy.
Watch video ▶

Claremont Review of Books | Review of George J. Borjas's We Wanted Workers, by Christopher Caldwell. Borjas is the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The American Prospect | Two new books explore how difficult the housing market and criminal justice system make it to climb out of poverty. Adam D. Reich of Columbia University reviews Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciencest at Harvard, and A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as Punishment for the Poor, by Alexis Harris, University of Washington.

Vox | Quotes Edward Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics: "This is unlikely to do much for road and bridge maintenance...And [economists] have long believed that the highest returns are for fixing existing infrastructure.”

“If [we] only built projects that could cover their costs with user charges, we would have far fewer white elephant projects,” says Harvard’s Glaeser. “However, we would also miss good projects as well. In particular, we would miss projects that mainly serve the less advantaged. Asking buses to pay for themselves would be a mistake.”

The New York Times Book Review | Review of Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets, by Leah Platt Boustan (Ph.D. '06), Professor of Economics at UCLA, and Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform, by Tommie Shelby, Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard.

The New Yorker | Cites research by psychologists Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University, which found that people "routinely underestimated existing wealth inequality."  Also quotes economist Justin Wolfers (Ph.D. '01), Professor of Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan.
View Norton and Ariely study

Harvard Gazette | Coverage of the the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies’ annual Summit on the Future of Europe. 

"Peter A. Hall, Harvard’s Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies, warned that in addition to its debt, banking, and growth crises, Europe faces a political one, with declining levels of trust in government and a shift away from mainstream politics. Hall argued that EU leaders worsened or caused the problem by seeking a “fuller fiscal or political union” in response to the Eurozone crisis, an approach that he said deprives national electorates of the sense that their governments are accountable."
View the conference agenda... Read more about 'Desperate but not hopeless times'

Chicago Tribune | Column cites research by Andrew Garin, Ph.D. candidate in Political Economy and Government, who examined the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 on local employment growth. Using geographically-detailed data on highway construction, Garin found no effect on employment in the local of the construction site, showing that this was because the majority of contractors, selected by competitive bidding, commute from other local labor markets.
View the research

The New York Times | Eduardo Porter column quotes Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy: “What happens when Trump realizes he cannot adequately respond to the expectations he has raised?” he asked. “Does he respond to economic failure like all populists around the world do — by further polarizing the nation and deepening divisions based on identity? And what does that do the quality of our democracy?”... Read more about Trump Campaign's Easy Answers Confront Hard Reality

International Business Times |  Alex Keyssar, Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy, interviewed.

Bloomberg News | Discusses new paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, by Edward Glaeser, Wei Huang (Ph.D. '16), Yueran Ma, and Andrei Shleifer. Wei Huang is currently a Post-doctoral Fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research.
View the research

Freakonomics Radio | Societies where people trust one another are healthier and wealthier. In the U.S. (and the U.K. and elsewhere), social trust has been falling for decades. Features Robert Putnam, Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy, and Edward Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics [audio + transcript].

Harvard Business Review | Essay by legal scholar Joan C. Williams draws from Michèle Lamont's book, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. Lamont is Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard.... Read more about What was the white working class thinking?

The New York Times | Cites Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology.

The Boston Globe | Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, offers perspective.

The Atlantic—CityLab | Explores research by Jeremy Levine (Ph.D. '16), now Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies, University of Michigan. View the research, forthcoming in the American Sociological Review... Read more about When Nonprofits Are the New City Leaders

Awardee: Monica Bell, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology & Social Policy... Read more about Monica Bell named a Harvard Law School Climenko Fellow

Awardee | Katerina Linos (Ph.D. '07)... Read more about International policy diffusion draws three book prizes

Awardee | Daniel Hopkins (Ph.D. '07)... Read more about Emerging scholar in political behavior

Awardee | Amanda Garrett (Ph.D. '13)... Read more about Best dissertation award in European politics

Awardee | Viridiana Rios (Ph.D. '13)... Read more about Best dissertation in public administration

Awardee | Traci Burch (Ph.D. '07)... Read more about Three book awards for 'Trading Democracy for Justice'

Awardees | Justin Wolfers (Ph.D. '01), Roland Fryer, and Parag Parthak... Read more about IMF names top 25 economists under age 45

Awardee | Asad L. Asad, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology.... Read more about Asad L. Asad receives ASA student paper award

Awardee | Robert J. Sampson... Read more about ASA Distinguished Book Award

Awardee | Patrick Sharkey (Ph.D. '07)... Read more about Outstanding scholarship in social demography

Awardee | Deirdre Bloome (Ph.D. '14)... Read more about Outstanding Paper Award in Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility

Awardee | David J. Harding (Ph.D. '05)... Read more about Early Career Award for Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility

Awardee | William Julius Wilson... Read more about William Julius Wilson awarded W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Career of Scholarship Award

Awardee | Anthony Jack, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology.... Read more about Anthony Jack receives ASA Outstanding Paper award

Awardees | Ryan Sakoda (Ph.D. candidate in Economics), Vanessa Williamson (Ph.D. candidate in Government & Social Policy), and Will R. Dobbie (Ph.D. '13)... Read more about Washington Center for Equitable Growth Announces Inaugural Class of Grantees

Awardee | Christopher Adolph (Ph.D. '05)... Read more about Best book award in comparative public policy

Awardee | Cybelle Fox (Ph.D. '07)... Read more about Book wins sixth award

Awardee |  Michèle Lamont

Awardee | Maria G. Rendon (Ph.D. '09)... Read more about Hellman Fellows announced

Awardee | Jal Mehta (Faculty, Ph.D. '06) 

HKS PolicyCast | Policy roundtable with Douglas Elmendorf, Brigitte Madrian, and David Ellwood. Second in a three-part series with Harvard Kennedy School experts on the challenges facing President-elect Trump. Look for an edited version of their discussion to appear in the winter issue of the Harvard Kennedy School Magazine.

Douglas Elmendorf, Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, led the Congressional Budget Office for six years before becoming Dean in 2016. Brigitte Madrian is a behavioral economist whose work focuses on household savings and investment behavior. David Ellwood is a leading expert on poverty and welfare in the United States. He served as Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School from 2004-2015, and is now focused on issues of inequality and mobility as Director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy.

The New York Times | By Justin Wolfers (Ph.D. '01), Professor of Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan.

Project Syndicate | By Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy, Harvard Kennedy School.

Brookings Institution | A forum examining questions of public investment—in both physical infrastructure and human capital—opened with keynote remarks by Lawrence Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus of Harvard University, and discussion from Edward Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics. (Summers provides a summary of his key points from the presentation and discussion on his blog).

Subsequent speakers turned to human capital investment, including Richard Murnane, Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Research Professor of Education and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Video, transcripts, and presentation materials from the day's events are available on the Brookings website.

Financial Times | By Lawrence Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus, Harvard University. This column also ran in the Washington Post.

IRP Poverty Research & Policy Podcast | IRP National Poverty Fellow Nicole Deterding (Ph.D. '15) talks about research she and colleague David Pedulla of Stanford University conducted that examined employers' responses to degrees from for-profit versus non-profit two-year colleges in the early phases of the hiring process [audio + transcript].

The National Poverty Fellows program is an academic/government partnership between the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) at the US Department of Health and Human Services. Learn more about Nicole Deterding's work:
nicoledeterding.com

Vox | By Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology. The key priority for progressives should be strengthening the Democratic Party at state and local levels, argues political scientist Theda Skocpol.

"Anti-institutional tendencies in today’s culture make the idea of dismantling the existing order attractive to many people. But social science research has long shown that majorities need strong organizations to prevail against wealthy conservative interests in democracies. The real problem in US politics today is hardly too much unified organizational heft on the center left; it is too little. Unless the Democratic Party becomes stronger and more effective, a radicalized Republican-conservative juggernaut is likely to take over for decades."

History News Network | Video interview with Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, conducted at the 2017 convention of the American Historical Association. Muhammad spoke earlier in the evening at a plenary session on "The First Hundred Days: Priorities for a New US President." The session, recorded by C-SPAN, will be available within a few weeks.

NPR On Point with Tom Ashbrook | With Alicia Sasser Modestino (Ph.D. '01), Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Economics, Northeastern University, and Associate Director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy.

C-SPAN | Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy the Harvard Kennedy School, was among the speakers for this plenary session of the 131st annual meeting of the American Historical Association, held January 5-8 in Denver. The panel also featured Nathan Citino (Rice University), Margaret O'Mara (University of Washington), Kenneth Pomeranz (University of Chicago), and Sean Wilentz (Princeton University). 

Washington Post
By Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

Canberra Times | By Andrew Leigh (Ph.D. '04). If you've ever referred to "the 1 per cent", you're using the work of Tony Atkinson. Tony, who died on January 1, aged 72, contributed as much as any modern economist to the study of poverty and inequality...(more)

Andrew Leigh met Tony Atkinson as an Inequality & Social Policy doctoral fellow in 2002, when Atkinson was invited to Harvard to present his work in the Inequality Seminar Series. As part of his visit, Atkinson also joined our proseminar workshop for doctoral fellows, where he served as a discussant for Andrew's research paper. Atkinson and Leigh subsequently went on to co-author a set of papers together examining inequality trends in Australia and New Zealand.

Andrew Leigh is now shadow assistant treasurer (Australia), and a former professor of economics at the Australian National University.

Tony Atkinson was an extraordinary human being. He was an economist by trade, who did more than anyone else to keep the study of income inequality alive from the 1960s to the mid-1990s, when most of his colleagues were either ignoring the subject or denying its importance.

He seemed to treat everyone he encountered, from the grandees of his profession to young graduate students, with decency and respect, and devoted thousands of hours to advancing other people's projects.

But he also cared deeply about persuading us all that rich countries could achieve low levels of economic inequality without suffering large reductions in economic efficiency or growth. Anyone who who has not read his last book, (Inequality: What Can Be Done?) should do so. 

—Christopher Jencks Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy, Emeritus

Inequality: What Can Be Done?
By Anthony B. Atkinson, Harvard University Press, 2015.

Tony Atkinson: Articles
Read more of Tony Atkinson's work at his personal website, where he selected what he thought were his most important articles in 15 topical areas.

Anthony B. Atkinson, Economist Who Pioneered Study of Inequality, Dies at 72
The New York Times

Passing of Anthony B. Atkinson
Le Monde (blog) | By Thomas Piketty. "Together with Simon Kuznets, Atkinson single-handedly originated a new discipline within the social sciences and political economy: the study of historical trends in the distribution of income and wealth."

Anthony Atkinson, a British economist and expert on inequality
The Economist

Perspectives on Politics | By Daniel Carpenter, Allie S. Freed Professor of Government. Part of the journal's winter issue reflections symposium on the relative absence of Native American scholarship and issues in the discipline of political science.

n+ 1 | The Democratic collapse and the ascent of Trumpism. By Daniel Schlozman (Ph.D. '11), Assistant Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University.

Schlozman is the author of When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton University Press, 2015), winner of the 2016 Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, conferred by the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association.

Washington Post | By Danielle Allen, Professor of Government and Director of the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard.

TalkPoverty Radio | TalkPoverty Radio revisits some of its favorite interviews from 2016, beginning with Matthew Desmond, "whose 2016 book Evicted brings to center stage how eviction is both a cause and a consequence of poverty." Desmond is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard.

Undisclosed (S2, Addendum 21) | Monica Bell, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology & Social Policy, talks class, race, and geography and how these shape trust/distrust in the criminal justice system. On the criminal justice podcast Undisclosed. Learn more about Monica Bell's research at her homepage: scholar.harvard.edu/bell 

LSE USAPP | By Ann Owens (Ph.D. '12), Assistant Professor of Sociology and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California. This essay is based on her article, ‘Inequality in Children’s Contexts’, in the American Sociological Review.
View the research (complimentary full-text)

The New York Times | By Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology. "...Repealing Obamacare means eliminating the taxes that subsidize health care for low- and middle-income people," a point that must be made clear, Skocpol writes. "That huge and immediate tax cut for the rich would lead to the demise of subsidized health insurance for millions of less privileged Americans in rural, suburban, and urban communities."

The Atlantic | By Victor Tan Chen (Ph.D. '12). On the hollowness of the modern economy and the effect it has on the working class. Chen is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy (University of California Press, 2015).