January 2011: Inequality and Financial Crises meeting

This winter, the Tobin Project convened top scholars to explore a question on the cutting edge of public and academic debate: Did economic inequality in the United States contribute to the financial crisis? These workshops built on research presented at Tobin’s 2010 conference on economic inequality – and later reported in the New York Times – suggesting potential links between high and rising inequality and economic instability. Participants included Anthony Atkinson (Oxford University, Economics), David Autor (MIT, Economics), Robert Frank (Cornell University,  Economics), Simon Johnson (MIT Sloan, Economics), Michael Kumhof (International Monetary Fund, Modeling Unit) and Emma Rothschild (Harvard University, History), among others. There is significant disagreement among experts about how (and whether) inequality may have provoked instability and which kinds of inequality may have played the greatest role, with some focused on the stagnation of the middle class and others pointing to the runaway top-end of the income spectrum.