Because two of their best friends come from a family of engineers, the questions those friends ask about 9-11 tend to address structural problems: "Why did the World Trade Towers collapse?" But when 12-year-old Max and 10-year-old Dashiel discuss 9-11 at home, they're more likely to ask, "Why do the terrorists hate us?" Or, "What causes terrorism?"
That's what happens when both of your parents are sociologists. And when your dad, David Grusky, is director of the just-launched Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, and your mom, Szonja Szelenyi, is associate director of the center, opening September 6.
Housed in the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, the center aims to become the go-to clearinghouse for information about the causes and consequences of contemporary inequality. Information on trends in the United States, including income inequality, the gender pay gap and residential segregation, will be available by means of customizable software.
"We hope to be a real service to policy makers, scholars and the interested public by bringing together trend data and making it possible to explore various hypotheses about poverty and inequality," Grusky says. "For example, if you think that unemployment has declined in the United States because incarceration rates have risen and that has drawn off people who are less readily employed, you could juxtapose trends in incarceration against trends in employment."
In the past, poverty and inequality were largely considered moral problems. But today's scholars approach critical issues—ethnic unrest, burgeoning HIV-positive populations, regional disparities in the standard of living—from interdisciplinary perspectives. About 100 Stanford faculty from economics, education, political science, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and law are affiliated with the center, and an undergraduate minor is being developed along with a master's degree in public policy. An interactive website will provide working papers from some 400 experts nationwide, and Stanford University Press will publish one book each year in the continuing series Controversies in Inequality.
Do we have an obligation to reduce poverty? Why is income inequality increasing so dramatically? Does poverty cause terrorism? Those are the kinds of questions faculty and students will be asking as the center offers public lectures by top scholars in the field. Also planned: a print and online magazine that will encourage scholars to "weigh in on policy issues in a way that sometimes they don't," says Grusky. Most often, he adds, "they get caught up in their own arcane, academic debates."
Instead, Grusky sees an exciting, big-picture opportunity. "Here's my idea for the first issue—have the main [presidential] candidates weigh in with their platforms on poverty and inequality, and then have scholars comment on them." He pauses. "But whether we can pull it off. . ."
