NSF Award Abstract - #0333403

IGERT: Multidisciplinary and Comparative Program in Inequality & Social Policy

Abstract

The Inequality & Social Policy program came into being in the very first cohort of IGERT grants provided by the National Science Foundation. During our initial award, we created a program that trained some forty young scholars to understand the origins, patterns, and consequences of inequality, focusing primarily on the American experience. For the renewal period, we seek support to deepen our work on domestic trends and complement it with more explicit and sustained attention to comparative patterns in Western Europe, where widening gaps between the top and bottom of the income distribution have developed as well. The European experience is particularly important because it is evolving in the context of political and social institutions that are dramatically different from the U.S., often designed to protect citizens from economic insecurity, poverty, and material hardship. Hence, while both regions experience bouts of unemployment, declining demand for low-skilled workers, and rising rates of single parenthood, the consequences are often different (in terms of poverty rates, segregation, and political participation) because of institutional variation. The intellectual merit of this renewal lies especially in challenge that comparative analysis poses to the frameworks, methods, and findings we have developed to understand the domestic patterns of inequality. The broader impact of the research and training we propose will be felt for years to come in the form of important new scholarship on the critical social problems that emerge out of historic levels of inequality, ranging from inequities in income and earnings, to gaps between racial groups in educational attainment and political participation, to spatial and geographic concentrations of disadvantage that affect employment, mobility, crime, health, and patterns of family formation. These are topics of considerable importance to the society we live in, and we encourage our students and faculty to write both for the profession and for the broad public. The web site we maintain receives over 2,000 hits per month, attesting to the broader impact of the scholarship we are producing in the course of this training grant. Twenty percent of our trainees in the first five years are minorities; over half are women. Nearly 30% of our faculty participants are minorities. We expect this track record will continue and that the renewal we seek will help us impact the diversity of the scientific workforce. Students admitted into Ph.D. programs in Economics, Political Science, Public Policy, Sociology or the newly created joint doctoral programs in Government & Social Policy and Sociology & Social Policy are eligible for the training program. Those accepted must participate in the following core activities: (1) Three-term Interdisciplinary Proseminar in In