David Grusky

David B. Grusky is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, Director of the Center on Poverty & Inequality, the California Welfare Laboratory, and Recession Trends, and coeditor of Pathways Magazine and the Social Inequality Series. His research addresses the changing structure of late-industrial inequality and addresses such topics as (a) the role of rent-seeking and market failure in explaining the takeoff in income inequality, (b) the amount of economic and social mobility in the U.S. and other high-inequality countries (with a particular focus on the “Great Gatsby” hypothesis that opportunities for social mobility are declining), (c) the role of essentialism in explaining the persistence of extreme gender inequality, (d) the forces behind recent changes in the amount of face-to-face and online cross-class contact, and (e) the putative decline of big social classes. He is also involved in projects to improve the country’s infrastructure for monitoring poverty, inequality, and mobility by exploiting administrative and other forms of “big data” more aggressively. His recent books include Social Stratification (2014), Occupy the Future (2013), The New Gilded Age (2012), The Great Recession (2011), The Inequality Reader (2011), and The Inequality Puzzle (2010).

Focal Areas: Education, Inequality, Taxes and Public Spending, Work