“The drift of disproportionate asset holdings toward the pinnacles of wealth carries a society away from meritocracy, productivity, empathy, and mobility. Carried far enough, skewness in wealth distribution can undermine social cohesion and our democratic ideals.”
— JAMES M. STONE
Eight Programs on Wealth Inequality
The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation has made a significant investment in the study of wealth inequality, with emphasis on the causes and consequences of increasing accumulation at the top of the wealth distribution.
The Foundation has funded wealth inequality projects at eight institutions: Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Harvard Kennedy School, Brown University, INSEAD, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, University College London, and University of Michigan.
The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY conducts and promotes quantitative research using inequality as a lens on society, the economy and politics. The faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and students working within the Center share a commitment to scholarship that is data-driven, interdisciplinary, and policy-oriented, and addresses questions about inequality throughout the world.
The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School unites faculty, students, and researchers from across Harvard University and beyond to better understand and address the causes and consequences of wealth inequalities in different populations around the world. The Program includes the work of the former Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy and adds new components, including a consortium of doctoral students in the social sciences whose research focuses on income and wealth inequality; policy-relevant and public-facing research that speaks to real-world problems; and public events to communicate research and engage members of the broader community.
Income and wealth inequality is recognised as one of the most critical issues of our day, yet its dynamics, causes and consequences are not fully understood. The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Centre for the Study of Wealth Inequality was founded in 2017 to address this need and serve as a leading venue for the research and teaching of income and wealth inequality issues.
The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley was created to serve as a research hub for campus and beyond, enabling UC Berkeley’s world-leading scholars to deepen our understanding of the inequality in society and formulate new approaches to address the challenge of creating a more equitable society. The Center serves as the primary convening point at UC Berkeley for research, teaching and data development concerning the causes, nature, and consequences of wealth and income inequalities with a special emphasis on the concentration of wealth at the very top.
The work of Brown University’s Stone Inequality Initiative is to advance research and teaching about the impact of great wealth on American society and institutions. We sponsor a range of activities designed to spark new research into the way changes in capitalism and the distribution of wealth have distorted markets, politics, and culture in America and how these new dimensions of inequality intersect with longstanding racial and gender inequalities. By engaging undergraduates, graduate students as well as a faculty from multiple disciplines, we aim to spur new thinking about what has made the new inequality so enduring and how we can create a more inclusive and equitable society.
The mission of the Stone Centre at University College London is to advance research and teaching to provide a clear understanding of the causes of wealth inequality, and its economic and political consequences. It will bring together leading economic researchers on these issues from around the world. Education and research are equal partners in the venture. The Stone Centre is pairing up the CORE project, which is transforming economics education around the world, with the research strengths of the UCL Economics Department. It will provide a global hub for research and learning that will make wealth concentration and its impacts on innovation and sustainability central to economics education.
The Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics (CID) at The University of Michigan is an open and multidisciplinary research center, bringing together students and faculty from a variety of fields, including sociology, economics, public policy, social work, philosophy, education, and others. It pursues cutting-edge research and innovative teaching on one of the central societal challenges of our time: social inequality. With a focus on the dynamics of social inequality, CID’s scientific mission is to develop a better understanding of changes and stability in social inequality across time, generations, and sociopolitical contexts. The center also helps expands the social scientific data infrastructure available to support research on these topics and increases the accessibility of high-quality data for inequality researchers everywhere.
The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at The University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy will pursue cutting-edge research on the nature of socio-economic inequality and barriers to mobility.