Speaker
Details
About the talk:
In the U.S. (and virtually all modern social systems), a long-standing objective has been to build an open society in which everyone – regardless of their class, race, ethnicity, or gender – has the opportunity to lead a fulfilling life. The extent to which societies are indeed open in this sense has, however, increasingly been monitored in a very narrow way … via unidimensional models of economic mobility that assume that getting ahead means making money and that other types of life projects and rewards are at best sideline commitments. We seek to expose this assumption by building a comprehensive multidimensional model of mobility that opens up to the possibility that tastes are heterogeneous (and endogenous) and that a host of different types of “life projects” are therefore being pursued. This approach allows us to take on – and answer – new types of questions about mobility. Are noneconomic commitments indeed nothing but minor “sidelines?” Or do many people build noneconomic life projects around the opportunity to innovate or create, to help others and “do good,” to be a “good provider” who stably supports their family, or to lead an adventurous and exciting life? Do they make tradeoffs between these different sensibilities in ways that create the appearance of more mobility than there really is? We build a comprehensive multidimensional model of mobility that opens up to the possibility that tastes are heterogeneous (and endogenous) and that a host of different types of “life projects” are being pursued.
About the speaker:
David B. Grusky is Edward Ames Edmonds Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University. His research describes different types of social inequality, how to monitor them, and how to reduce them.