Because It Helps Us Understand (and Change) Our Society

It would be hard not to notice that we are living in a world of increasing inequality. According to data collected by the Federal Reserve, the share of the nation’s wealth owned by the top one percent of U.S. wealth holders increased almost 50 percent, from 22.8 percent in 1989 to 31.9 percent at the end of 2025.  Meanwhile, the gap between high and low earners has also been expanding.  One widely used measure is the ratio of wages of workers at the 90th percentile of the earnings distribution to those at the 10th percentile (the 90-10 gap).   According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 90-10 gap was 3.7 in 1979 and grew to 5.0 by 2014, roughly where it is today. 

This widening gap helps us understand why robust economic growth has not translated into more positive views about the economy. GDP per capita, the conventional scorecard of economic performance, has more than doubled since the mid-1980s.  But, because of the growing income gap, this prosperity has not been widely shared.  For example, adjusted for inflation, the real compensation of production workers today is no higher than it was in 1979 (see MeasuringWorth.com). This marks a major shift.  In the 100 years from 1879 to 1979, the compensation of production workers grew at roughly the same rate as GDP per capita.

These facts both help us to understand our experience of the modern economy and raise a whole host of questions.  Why are the fruits of economic growth increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few?  Have there been other times when there has been a similar level of inequality?  What can we learn from past experiences?  What will happen in the future? 

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Because Misogyny Is Still Alive and Well and Women Still Don’t “Rule” Equally to Men

Fifty years after Ruth Bader Ginsberg worked to secure constitutional equality for women, misogyny is still alive and well in the American political system. We only need to look at the Vice Presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence to see the way in which gender is used to undermine the ability of women to lead. Women candidates like Harris are often talked over and interrupted repeatedly by their male opponents. Unlike men who are interrupted, they can’t redirect the flow of conversation with a sharp reprimand (or a “just shut up, man”), but must find ways to do so while maintaining likability. When they act publicly, women politicians are often denigrated, as we heard Trump do to Senator Kamala Harris after the VP debate.

Why does this matter? Research shows that when women candidates are belittled or their credibility or electability is questioned, it dampens other women’s political ambitions. While we saw a “blue wave” of women candidates in 2018, far fewer women than men aspire to elected office. Social scientists point out that American women are still shaped by traditional gender socialization, or raised to embrace traditional family roles. Unlike men, women rarely assume future partners will fully share these responsibilities; nor do they expect that future partners would quit a job or relocate to support the women’s professional aspirations. Many educated, professional women who seem appropriate for a political career work a “second shift” after returning home — and feel too time-crunched to run for office. American politics, long dominated by men, has a masculine ethos; women and men alike perceive political success as being linked to masculine traits such as self-promotion and fighting, and many do not think to encourage women to run for office. Women themselves often do not envision pursuing such a male-coded profession, which could make them appear to be more aggressive than nurturing. Additionally, women tend to be more election- and risk-averse than men and can be discouraged by barriers that men do not face, including sexist media coverage, intrusive questions about their life choices, overt sexual harassment, online misogynist abuse, or accusations of lying.

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Because It Can Become a Tool to Dismantle White Supremacy

The 1966 Coleman Report was our nation’s first big social science project. It gathered and analyzed data from 600,000 students, 60,000 teachers and 4,000 public schools; it was designed to address the nation’s failure to provide “equal education opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion or national origin.” The magnitude of persistent racial inequality in America was not in doubt at the time, nor was there doubt that the social sciences could help to explain the causes of inequity and recommend policies to level the field. In the years since Coleman’s landmark study, the social sciences have abundantly done so. A half-century of increasingly sophisticated research (e.g., on early childhood interventions, residential segregation, and neighborhood effects) and conceptual advances (e.g., critical race theory, intergroup relations, and stereotype threat) have given the country a much deeper understanding of inequality’s causes and consequences.

Despite this progress, it is evident that racism has a stronger hold than we thought possible. The civil rights era hoped to reestablish meaningful citizenship only to find institutional racism had dug in, gerrymandering and voter suppression had replaced poll taxes, a war on crime and a war on drugs resulted in police brutality and a massive incarceration rate. Social science has succeeded in documenting all of this, but our focus on evidence-based policy has underscored (and perhaps even widened) the gap between knowledge and the impact of what we know.

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