State of the Union: The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016

The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality (CPI), one of the country's three federally-funded poverty centers, is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to monitoring trends in poverty and inequality, examining what is driving those trends, and developing science-based policy on poverty and inequality. We present here our third annual report examining the "state of the union" on poverty, inequality, and labor market outcomes.The purpose of establishing this annual series of reports is to ensure that critical facts on poverty and inequality enjoy the same visibility as other indicators of the country's health. There are of course all manner of analyses that take on separately such issues as poverty, employment, income inequality, health inequality, economic mobility, or educational access. This report instead provides a unified analysis that brings together evidence across these and other domains and thus allows for a comprehensive assessment of where the country stands

A nagy egyenlőtlenségek társadalmilag káros következményei

A jövedelmi egyenlőtlenségeknek az Egyesült Államokban tapasztalt lendületes növekedése már meglehetősen régóta tart; mostanra megkérdőjelezhetetlen, és szemlátomást stabil eleme lett hétköznapjainknak. Jóllehet sok kutatás vizsgálta már, mik az okai ennek a lendületnek, miből táplálkozik, mégis nagyon keveset tudunk arról, hogyan is próbálják az emberek a maguk számára kialakítani a megélhetés új módozatait egy olyan társadalomban, ahol az egyenlőtlenségek mértéke egyre csak fokozódik. Hogyan változtatták meg a növekvő jövedelmi egyenlőtlenségek azokat a szabályokat, amelyek betartása révén az emberek képesnek bizonyulnak betagozódni korunk kulcsszerepet betöltő intézményeibe (vegyük példának akár a családot, akár a katonaságot, a börtönt vagy az oktatási rendszert)? Hogyan változott meg a szabályoknak az az együttese, melyek alapján például a piacgazdaság rendszere „jutalmazza” a résztvevőket? Hogyan hatott mindez életvitelünk alkalmazkodóképességére? Hogyan változtatta meg életünket vezérlő attitűdjeinket s azokat a politikai ideológiákat, amelyekre fölesküdtünk

Micro-class mobility: social reproduction in four countries

In the sociological literature on social mobility, the long-standing convention has been to assume that intergenerational reproduction takes one of two forms, either a categorical form that has parents passing on a big-class position to their children, or a gradational form that has parents passing on their socioeconomic standing to their children. These conventional approaches ignore in their own ways the important role that occupations play in transferring advantage and disadvantage from one generation to the next. In log-linear analyses of nationally representative data from the United States, Sweden, Germany, and Japan, we show that (a) occupations are an important conduit for reproduction, (b) the most extreme rigidities in the mobility regime are only revealed when analyses are carried out at the detailed occupational level, and (c) much of what shows up as big-class reproduction in conventional mobility analyses is in fact occupational reproduction in disguise. Although the four countries studied here differ in the extent to which the occupational form has been institutionalized, we show that it is too prominent to ignore in any of these countries. Even in Japan, which has long been regarded as distinctively 'deoccupationalized,' we find evidence of extreme occupational rigidities. These results suggest that an occupational mechanism for reproduction may be a fundamental feature of all contemporary mobility regimes. [author's abstract

Listening to the Voices of America

We make the case for building a permanent public-use platform for conducting and analyzing immersive interviews on the everyday lives of Americans. The American Voices Project (AVP)—a widely watched experiment with this new platform—provides important early evidence on its promise. The articles in this issue reveal that, although public-use interview datasets obviously cannot meet all research needs, they do provide new opportunities to study small or hidden populations, new or emerging social problems, reactions to ongoing social crises, submerged values and attitudes, and many other aspects of American life. We conclude that a permanent AVP platform would help build an “open science” form of qualitative research that complements— rather than replaces—the existing very important body of immersive-interviewing research

Occupy: in theory and practice

This paper situates the discourse of the Occupy movement within the context of radical political philosophy. Our analysis takes place on two levels. First, we conduct an empirical analysis of the ‘official’ publications of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Occupy London (OL). Operationalising core concepts from the framing perspective within social movement theory, we provide a descriptive-comparative analysis of the ‘collective action frames’ of OWS and OL. Second, we consider the extent to which radical political philosophy speaks to the discourse of Occupy. Our empirical analysis reveals that both movements share diagnostic frames, but there were notable differences in terms of prognostic framing. The philosophical discussion suggests that there are alignments between anarchist, post-anarchist and post-Marxist ideologies at the level of both identity and strategy. Indeed, the absence of totalising anti-capitalist or anti-statist positions in Occupy suggests that – particularly with Occupy London – alignments are perhaps not so distant from typically social democratic demands

The Effect of the Earned Income Tax Credit in the District of Columbia on Poverty and Income Dynamics

Using unique longitudinal administrative tax panel data for the District of Columbia (DC), we assess the combined effect of the DC supplemental earned income tax credit (EITC) and the federal EITC on poverty and income dynamics within Washington, DC, from 2001 to 2011. The EITC in DC merits investigation, as the DC supplement to the federal credit is the largest in the nation. The supplemental DC EITC was enacted in 2000, and has been expanded from 10 percent of the federal credit in 2001 to 40 percent as of 2009. To implement the study, we estimate least squares models with 0/1 dependent variables to estimate the likelihood of net-EITC income above poverty and near-poverty thresholds. We also estimate the likelihood of earnings growth and income stabilization from the EITC. To identify the effect of the EITC, we exploit variation in the EITC subsidy rate from 2008 to 2009, when an additional EITC bracket of 45 percent was added for workers with three or more dependent children, up from 40 percent in the previous year for workers with two or more children. We also estimate a model examining the impact of city-level changes to the EITC. The structure and richness of our data enable us to control for tax filer fixed effects, an important innovation from many previous EITC studies. Overall, we find that the combined EITC raises the likelihood of net-EITC income above poverty and near poverty by as much as 9 percent, with the largest consistent effects accruing to single-parent families

Should scholars own data?

Lecture delivered at the European University Institute in Florence on 1 February 2023A video interview was recorded with the presenter on 2 February 2023Across much of the social sciences, the means of scientific production (i.e., datasets) have become increasingly concentrated, with a shrinking number of datasets responsible for an ever-larger share of total scientific production. There is, however, one very idiosyncratic research zone – that of qualitative science – in which this trend has been suppressed and a cottage-industry mode of production persists. Under a cottage-industry mode, research is predicated on (a) limited up-front funding, (b) small-scale production, and (c) a division of labor in which a single researcher is responsible for the full research-production process (data collection, data analysis, article production). Although virtually all social science once took this cottage-industry form, the postwar expansion of science fueled the rise of omnibus public-use surveys and administrative datasets within the quantitative field. This had a concentrative effect in which a small number of quantitative datasets came to account for a growing share of quantitative research (e.g., national public authority registers). By contrast, qualitative scholars have been largely cut from such public research funding, and highly decentralised data collection continues to be incentivised by conveying ownership rights to individual data collectors. This cottage-industry mode has made it difficult for qualitative scholars to meet standard open science commitments to transparent, reproducible, and cumulative research. If qualitative work were to be rebuilt around open science principles, it will likely be necessary to open up new streams of public funding for omnibus qualitative data sets, just as has long been the case within the quantitative field. The American Voices Project – the first nationally-representative open qualitative data set in the US – is a radical test of this hypothesis. The purpose of this talk is to discuss the promise and pitfalls of this new open-science form of qualitative research as well as opportunities to institutionalize it across the world