"Dynamics of Inequality in America from 1968 to Today"

Conference takes stock of inequality, sets course for
new research directions

IPR former directors (from l.) Louis Masotti, Burton Weisbrod, Margaret Gordon, and Raymond Mack.

On April 16-17, some of the nation's leading researchers analyzed and debated the character of inequality in the United States over the last four decades at a conference organized by Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research on the occasion of its 40th anniversary.

“The urban and racial inequities of the 1960s drove the decision to launch a center to conduct policy-relevant research at Northwestern in the 1968–69 academic year,” said Fay Lomax Cook, IPR’s director. “Inequality has remained a major theme woven through much of our faculty research over the years—research that began with studies of racial disparities and redlining in Chicago and expanded over the years to encompass issues of poverty, gender, health, crime, and education, with an emphasis on providing hard data and workable models for policy-relevant solutions.”

In dissecting inequality in its various manifestations, the scholars scrutinized a host of topics over the two-day conference. They discussed persistent racial/ethnic and education gaps, concentrated poverty and housing, inequality in men’s and women’s wages, links between poverty and crime, and the widening chasm between the richest and poorest Americans and how it is contributing to a rift in the democratic process. While each of the speakers noted the progress made, they also outlined the substantial challenges that remain.

Costs and Consequences of Economic Inequality

In the opening keynote, Christopher Jencks, formerly an IPR fellow and currently a sociologist in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, set the stage for the conference. He pointed to the explosion in incomes among the richest 10 percent of America's households over the last two decades.

Conceding that increases in the top incomes are usually followed by slightly faster economic growth, Jencks asked, “How long will it take for the bottom 90 percent to get back what they lost because we now allocate 43 percent of the nation's personal income to the top decile instead of 33 percent? The answer is that it takes about 13 years before the bottom 90 percent get to the break-even point.”

In comparing Western democracies, Jencks found that those countries with tighter market regulation had lower rates of inequality. He presented data challenging the free-market argument that reducing economic inequality has usually translated into lower per capita income or decreased worker efficiency. Furthermore, he pointed to the hidden costs of sustained economic inequality—limited opportunities, in particular for poor children, and widening disparities in political influence.

Click here for the Keynote presentation.

Unequal Democracy

Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels plunged into an explanation of why American democracy has become more unequal. Why do some Americans, especially the working poor who have done better overall under Democratic presidents since 1948, consistently ignore their economic interests and vote for Republicans? It is not an issue of values, Bartels finds, but rather short-sightedness. Voters generally cast their vote for an incumbent based on election-year income growth—and Republicans have done a better job of increasing income in election years.

Bartels’ analysis of Senate votes between 1989 and 1994, however, reveals that both parties are equally guilty of ignoring the interests of low-income voters and catering to special interests and the wealthy. Extraordinary events can lead to seismic changes in the political landscape, Bartels said. Yet a person’s vote remains a powerful means to have an impact on the political process, he concluded.

Click here for the PowerPoint presentation.

Why Does Inequality Matter?
Economist Rebecca Blank wrapped up the two days with a Distinguished Public Policy Lecture on changes in economic inequality over the past 50 years. Blank is a former IPR fellow and former dean of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy who recently left the Brookings Institution to become Under Secretary for Economic Affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Changes in family structure over the past 30 years, such as more women in the workforce and more marriages between higher-earning men and women, account for about one-third of the observed increase in household income inequality. The rest, Blank noted, can be attributed to increased earnings inequality—CEOs are taking home more than ever, while minimum wage has failed to keep up with inflation.

At the same time, as inequality widens, overall incomes are shifting upward, Blank said. “In general, we would have preferred to see these big upward shifts in the income distribution occurring because of rising real wages rather than because of rising work effort,” she remarked.

Blank agreed with Bartels that only remarkable circumstances can reverse those forces that have led to a trend of rising inequality. She optimistically concludes that in a time of economic or catastrophic shock, a different social climate could allow for more redistributive policies and that such policies would have a real chance at reversing the trend of increasing inequality in this country.

Click here for PowerPoint presentation.

Race and Inequality
Interspersed between these keynote talks came five panel discussions, beginning with the topic of race. IPR sociologist and African American studies professor Mary Pattillo introduced the panel by reviewing some of the key IPR research contributions in this area, including work on housing and discrimination, the black middle class, and child welfare. Sociologists Lawrence Bobo of Harvard and Ronald Angel of the University of Texas looked at how African Americans and Hispanics are still held back by structurally embedded beliefs and policies. Bobo cited how a general belief that blacks are responsible for their own disadvantaged status is growing—even within the black community, and this trend has translated into declining support for government intervention.

Click here for PowerPoint presentation by Lawrence Bobo.
Click here for PowerPoint presentation by Ronald Angel.

Gender and Inequality
In opening the panel on gender and inequality, IPR psychologist Alice Eagly looked back at some of IPR’s pioneering gender studies in the era of second-wave feminism. By some measures, women in the United States are faring better in 2008 than in 1968. But Harvard political scientist Jane Mansbridge explained how cultural and familial barriers, rather than outright prejudice, hold the percentage of national legislative seats filled by women in the United States to a meager 15 percent, or 83rd in the world. Stanford sociologist Paula England pointed out that advances in gender equality have been largely one-sided—with women earning higher degrees and moving into male-dominated fields without reciprocal changes in men’s career patterns—and that even this progress has leveled out since 1990. Both Mansbridge and England are former IPR fellows.

Click here for PowerPoint presentation by Jane Mansbridge.
Click here for PowerPoint presentation by Paula England.

The City and Inequality
In the panel on cities, Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson bolstered the “broken windows” theory of crime and neighborhood decline—which IPR political scientist Wesley G. Skogan, who moderated the panel, was one of the first to test empirically—with evidence showing that perceived disorder strongly predicts later rates of poverty and racial/ethnic composition in urban neighborhoods. Political scientist and sociologist John Mollenkopf of the CUNY Center for Urban Research decried the decline in urban studies and offered hope that the Obama administration might spark a resurgence of interest in seeking solutions for the nation’s urban ills.

Click here for PowerPoint presentation by Wesley Skogan.
Click here for PowerPoint presentation by John Mollenkopf.

Education and Inequality
On the education panel, University of Chicago sociologist Charles Payne, a former IPR fellow and former graduate student of IPR’s founding director Raymond Mack, cited evidence that students have fewer absences and failures in schools that foster relationships and trust. Yale economist Joseph Altonji, a former associate director of IPR, talked about his work on U.S. skill distribution, linking a 6 percent increase in skill acquisition since 1979 to parental education levels. But overall skill distribution within race and sex groups continues to widen, shrinking employment opportunities for workers at the bottom. IPR education and social policy professor James Rosenbaum detailed one example of shifts in education priorities where in higher education the challenge has shifted from college access to college completion.

Click here for PowerPoint presentation by Charles Payne.
Click here for PowerPoint presentation by Joseph Altonji.

Health and Inequality
In linking health and social disparities, IPR anthropologist Christopher Kuzawa related how environmental forces, such as socioeconomic status and discrimination, affect fetal development and can account for disparities in cardiovascular disease rates for minorities. Harvard public health researcher Dolores Acevedo-Garcia detailed the linkages between poor health outcomes for minority children and residential segregation. Developmental psychologist Lindsay Chase-Lansdale and anthropologist Thomas McDade, who lead IPR’s Cells to Society Center and moderated the panel, described how a growing realization of linkages between social contexts and outcomes is creating the need for a more interdisciplinary approach in health disparities research.

Click here for PowerPoint presentation by Christopher Kuzawa.
Click here for PowerPoint presentation by Dolores Acevedo-Garcia.
Click here for PowerPoint presentation by Lindsay Chase-Lansdale and Thomas McDade.

How Far Have We Come?
The statistics culled from the panels show that in the United States today, there is a rising black middle class, but blacks and Hispanics are about three times more likely to be poor than whites. Black and Hispanic children have lower high school and college graduation rates and face higher risks for heart disease and diabetes. Crime in major metropolitan areas is down from all-time highs in the early 1990s but still affects low-income, minority neighborhoods disproportionally. Women earned about 58 cents on the dollar compared with men in 1968 and 75 cents today, but only a handful lead Fortune 500 companies or wield substantial political power.

“While there are areas where progress has been made, inequality is still with us, as a persistent and pernicious force, a threat to social, economic, and political progress in our nation,” Cook said. “Yet this remarkable cadre of academics, including many current and former IPR faculty, embody the Institute’s hallmark—that rigorous scholarship can help us better understand social inequality and pave the way to the creative and coherent development of policies to tackle these disparities.”

Click here for the complete conference agenda.