Inequality Reconsidered: The Stone Center’s Distinctive Approach

When it was established in 2022, the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the Harris School of Public Policy set out to advance groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research on the origins and nature of contemporary inequalities.

It embarks on that mission partly through its pillars of education and public outreach, according to Center Director Steven Durlauf, the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor at Harris.

Over five days in early November, the Center presented events that bolstered both roles. The Harris School’s first Inequality Week, entitled Inequality Reconsidered, was held Nov. 3-7 in the Keller Center and featured prominent economist Samuel Bowles, a research professor at the Santa Fe Institute who has studied wealth inequality and institutions for six decades and who had served as an advisor to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It was the latest example of the Center’s integrated approach — a place that transcends the social sciences to conduct research on how education, class, occupation, income, wealth and other factors influence socioeconomic mobility. Performing rigorous research in those areas allows the Stone Center to guide policy that lessens socioeconomic inequality, enhances mobility, and expands economic well-being.

“We believe it’s crucial to move beyond the economist’s viewpoint and examine sociology, psychology, political science and other fields to truly gain a comprehensive understanding of inequality,” said Durlauf. “By doing so, we position the Center to inform policy that has the greatest likelihood of broad improvements in socioeconomic equality.”

To that end, the Stone Center conducts research in 12 areas, including education, the environment, health, political economy, social interactions, and methodology.

Inequality Reconsidered’s weeklong series is among many ongoing events, working papers, and podcasts the Center utilizes to demonstrate its distinctive expertise and offer students a rare and multifaceted academic experience.

“This series is intended to offer our audience more than attractive, stylized facts,” Stone Center Executive Director Grace Kolavo, AB’10, MBA’24, said. “We’re aiming for nuanced insights into inequality dynamics, the impacts and ethics of extreme wealth disparities, and the influence that disproportionate concentrations of wealth can confer.”

Ox-drawn plow as robot

Bowles, whose work has had a profound impact on the subject of inequality, was the inaugural guest of the Center’s The Inequality Podcast. Launched in 2023, the podcast features scholars across disciplines who discuss the causes and consequences of inequality and strategies to promote economic mobility. The podcast is hosted by Durlauf, with Associate Directors  Damon Jones, Associate Professor at the Harris School, and Geoffrey Wodtke, Professor at the Department of Sociology,  as well as Ariel Kalil, the Daniel Levin Professor at Harris. As a return to the show’s roots, the Bowles episode was re-released on Nov. 3 to kick off the week.

In a rare and intimate lecture on Nov. 4, Bowles spoke about the origins and future of economic inequality to a standing-room-only crowd at the Sky Suite.

Bowles emphasized the importance of understanding ancient inequalities and noted that “aggressive egalitarianism” — generally defined as a system of rules, including public shaming, exclusion and physical punishment, that maintains societal parity — prevented enduring economic inequality until the invention of ox-drawn plows about 7,000 years ago.

“The ox-drawn plow is basically the robot of that era,” he said. “It displaced labor in a huge way.”

Bowles noted that ox-drawn agriculture allowed farmers to significantly increase the amount of land they could work and offered hoe farmers a better economic incentive to shift their role in the work.

Those circumstances produced a dependent group of people who were redundant, Bowles said.

A ruling elite was created and protected their wealth by concentrating political power in their hands, preventing an uprising from the people the elite were exploiting. Enslavement, which converted human labor into an asset that could be passed on to future generations, contributed to a massive upswing in wealth inequality, Bowles said.

Overall, Bowles said, three basic factors influence the level of enduring inequality: culture, technology, and institutions. And three conditions sustain inequality: economic, political, and “group selection, which just means groups which are highly unequal have to survive as groups.”

The information economy

The future of economic inequality, Bowles said, will take into account the move to information wealth from material wealth.

“I’m suggesting that a lot of what’s important in the modern economy today is not obviously domesticable,” he said, “but we will domesticate it, through intellectual property rights, only at huge losses.”

That move toward information wealth may be accompanied by a societal shift back toward what is essentially a hunter-gatherer economy, Bowles said, with a change in what is being hunted and what is being gathered.

“Whether we make that move is a political question, not an economic question,” he said, noting that democracy is a form of aggressive egalitarianism. “But, if we do move in that direction, there are possibilities for major changes in the direction of a more just society.”

But what does all this mean? This conversation held two days later with Durlauf, moderated by Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Dean and Sydney Stein Professor at Harris, attracted a vibrant and engaged crowd to the forum. The discussion focused on why economic inequalities endure  and on the future of economic inequality as society moves toward an economy based in information and knowledge, new forms of capital that are more difficult to privatize and inherit.

That environment could reduce the importance of physical capital in the economy and lead to fewer capital-intensive industries, Bowles said.

The jobs that artificial intelligence and robotics cannot perform will involve speaking face-to-face—teaching, caretaking, even waiting on tables, for example. Those jobs require workers to possess “intrinsic motivation,” such as reciprocity and altruism, which are more challenging to cultivate in highly unequal societies where fear and greed are key motivators, Bowles said.

He and Durlauf agreed that aggressive competition policies and intellectual property reforms are important to reducing inequality, while Durlauf emphasized the importance of addressing moral questions in economic theory and policy: that egalitarian arguments resonate with American values of opportunity.

Wrapping up their comments, Bowles and Durlauf urged economists to teach and research more advanced theories of inequality that include material and non-material components of inequality–those which take into account the moral component of economic choices.

Deeper understanding

Durlauf contends that no economist has had a more profound influence on the understanding of inequality since World War II than Bowles. He noted Bowles’s work challenging neoclassical economics—particularly on the nature of labor market institutions; Bowles’s insight on the role of wealth inequality beyond income inequality; and Bowles’s research on non-consumption determinants of well-being, including trust and altruism—all elements Durlauf called “essential to contemporary economics.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who is intellectually as open-minded as Sam Bowles,” Durlauf said. “He loves ideas and his capacity to integrate those ideas into research without any presumptions about his own discipline are really unparalleled.”

Beyond those qualities, Durlauf called Bowles “a wonderful person” and role model who has mentored numerous students and co-authors.

The discussions underscore the Stone Center’s commitment to creating an environment where students expand and deepen their critical thinking and understanding of the complexities involved in inequality.

Harris students Hazel Puchalsky and Meryl Davis, both MPP’26, attended both Inequality Reconsidered events. They both reported appreciating the blending of economics with other disciplines and the call from both economists to, as Davis said, “inject a little more humanity” into the field.

“It’s great to kind of jump right into this our very first quarter,” Puchalsky said. “I’m appreciative that they’re having this. I’m really enjoying the opportunity to learn more about inequality and have these interactions with professors.”

They will not have to wait long for the next Stone Center event. Public talks are held quarterly. As an ongoing initiative, the Center is hosts The Inequality Workshop for faculty and students to learn and discuss cutting-edge inequality research. December will also offer a conference exploring the connections between different measures of inequality, disparity, and discrimination.