In an April issue of The Economist, an article examines the effects of rising inequality on the reality of the "American dream," and references research from the upcoming Tobin Project conference on the economic, political, and social consequences of rising inequality.
The Tobin Project held its second graduate student forum on November 20. The day-long discussion centered on innovative new directions in the study of political economy — in particular, working through the implications of the recent financial crisis.
These interdisciplinary graduate student forums have involved 24 students from the nation’s leading Ph.D. programs, providing unique opportunities to develop and share new research on topics that fall outside of the narrow parameters of current academic discourse.
Today’s doctoral students will shape the intellectual paradigms that influence our public policy in the future. Yet this larger project can be obscured by career concerns and an attendant need to not stray too far from a discipline’s intellectual orthodoxies.
At an inaugural meeting of the Economic Inequality working group, scholars identify a number of domains for research, each of which offers a promising setting for promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration and highlighting important research questions. While the scholars agree that inequality has been reasonably well-measured, they also note that research on the causes of increased inequality has produced little consensus and that there is markedly little work on the consequences of and remedies for inequality.