Income and Wealth Inequality: Evidence and Policy Implications

SERIES: A New Social Compact? Rising Inequality, Intransigent Poverty, and the Path Forward

We are all familiar with the social sciences as an academic category, but we don’t often stop to think about how much is bundled into this modest label: anthropology, economics, law, linguistics, political science, communication, psychology, and sociology, just for a start. Scholars in these fields have a shared goal: to understand how we live together, what works and what doesn’t in our social lives, and how we could do it all better.

In 2004, Stanford established the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (known colloquially as IRiSS and pronounced like the flower) to give researchers the space and leisure to work on these goals. In this annual series of public lectures, the Executive Director of IRiSS invites colleagues to Stanford for a discussion of each guest’s research and to give you, the audience, ample time to engage in the conversation. This year's series, A New Social Compact?, is organized in collaboration with the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.

Income and Wealth Inequality: Evidence and Policy Implications

How is inequality connected to our schools, our governments, and even the taxes we pay? In this lecture, Emmanuel Saez will present evidence on income and wealth inequality gathered by a group of researchers in the World Top Incomes Database. The database includes top income and wealth share for more than twenty countries. Saez will explain the key findings, focusing particularly on the United States, and will discuss the role of technology, globalization, education, government regulations, and tax policy in explaining those findings.

Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley

Emmanuel Saez holds the Chancellor’s Professorship of Tax Policy and Public Finance and is director of the Center for Equitable Growth at UC Berkeley. He was awarded the John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association in 2009 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010.