This report outlines policies that will damage American science. 1. Many problems are asserted, yet no evidence is given of their importance. The gratuitous attacks on DEI are one example. In other cases, narratives about linear versus nonlinear scientific systems are too vague to mean anything. 2. A major thrust of the report is the transfer of government support from basic research to applied research. This is done without justification and misunderstands the scientific enterprise. 3. Redirection of resources from universities to individuals and the private sector will cause enormous damage to the overall scientific infrastructure of the country. 4. The report's proposals undermine processes of peer/professional review in favor of political control and oversight. The report opens the door to politicization of scientific funding and bureaucratic interference in the research process. It will implicitly create a high discount rate for valuing scientific progress. 5. The report ignores the importance of foreign born researchers in the American scientific enterprise. 6. The report ignores the importance of the level of government investment in science. Pieties about reducing bureaucracy, etc. are political pablum. I just signed this letter and urge others to do so.

This is an extraordinary book from a major political figure. Liam Byrne is a Member of Parliament for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North. The book combines deep understanding of the relevant social science with an agenda to reduce inequality from that ranges from Universal Savings Accounts to annual wealth taxes to policies to promote knowledge-intensive jobs. The discussion of knowledge intensive jobs is deeply prescient with respect to the AI revolution. A lovely feature of the book is the way it builds on ideas about inequality that derive from James Meade. I was honored to have this public conversation with Liam Byrne @liambyrnemp which was hosted by the UChicago Stone Center @UCStoneCenter. It may be watched here

Looking forward to @KhoaVuUmn developing the sequel study in which the treatment is interactions with economists. I suspect intraeconomist interactions generate smaller effect magnitudes than interdisciplinary ones.

Not just top 25, but top 5. No film better captured the moral and social damage done by the Vietnam War to the United States. The one time in my life I walked out of a new movie and thought I had seen one of the best films ever made. And for me, no film has portrayed the US so critically.

Looking forward to @KhoaVuUmn developing the sequel study in which the treatment is interactions with economists. I suspect intraeconomist interactions generate smaller effect magnitudes than interdisciplinary ones.

This is an extraordinary book from a major political figure. Liam Byrne is a Member of Parliament for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North. The book combines deep understanding of the relevant social science with an agenda to reduce inequality from that ranges from Universal Savings Accounts to annual wealth taxes to policies to promote knowledge-intensive jobs. The discussion of knowledge intensive jobs is deeply prescient with respect to the AI revolution. A lovely feature of the book is the way it builds on ideas about inequality that derive from James Meade. I was honored to have this public conversation with Liam Byrne @liambyrnemp which was hosted by the UChicago Stone Center @UCStoneCenter. It may be watched here

Delighted that this paper with Kristina Butaeva @Butaeva_K and Alexander Shapoval is now public. Before discussing the paper, it is important to note that Kristina, who is currently a postdoc at @UCStoneCenter, will be on the job market this year. She is an absolutely first-rate scholar whose presence would make any social science community in the world a more vibrant one. Our analysis uses a remarkable data set from the Liaoning province in Northeast China developed by James Lee and Cameron Campbell, which allows us to study the evolution for status mobility for six generations from the late 1700's to the end of Imperial China. These data allow us to estimate a nonhomogeneous Markov transition matrix for mobility and thereby reveal how mobility evolved. We employ some novel intergenerational mobility calculations that derive from alternative mobility concepts—the persistence of class origin across generations and intergenerational class movement. These tools reveal some broad patterns. While each generation possesses a specific mobility structure, we identify two epochs that characterize them. Before 1850, the generation-specific transition matrices appear to exhibit convergence toward a steady state. In contrast, the second epoch, beginning around 1850, exhibits unstable intergenerational class dynamics that persist until the dynasty’s collapse. This epoch reveals a collapse of upward mobility for the late empire. Interestingly, the transition between epochs coincides with the Opium Wars and Taiping Rebellion, demonstrating how the footprints of major crises in the late Qing era appear in the mobility dynamics.

Some comments on Marx and mainstream economics Having seen a recent recent set of tweets attacking the economics discipline in general and UChicago economics, in particular, apparently on the basis that Marxist thought is unrepresented in elite departments, I make some observations in response. With respect to UChicago economics and the Chicago School, I post this video. Samuel Bowles (starting at 9:00) discusses the beginning of his career when Harvard acted to fire him for no signing a loyalty oath. He stayed at Harvard when the requirement was overturned in court. In the interim, Zvi Griliches (then at Chicago) called him to say he should come to UChicago, and that Gary Becker and Milton Friedman agreed. I may be an economist at Chicago, but I am certainly not a "Chicago economist," and present this as evidence on the actual department as opposed to a stereotype. Make no mistake, it is terrible that Bowles, Herbert Gintis and Duncan Foley (to name what I think are the most egregious examples) were not tenured by Harvard (B and G) and Stanford (F) respectively. And John Roemer should have been pursued by every elite economics department. But this reflects the situation 40 years ago. Second, complaints that contemporary elite economics departments do not include Marxists fail, at least in their social media form, for three distinct reasons. 1. The critiques typically fail to give any substantive reason why the omission matters. Economics, as a body of thought, has evolved towards a set of objects of study that are very different from political economy as classically understood. If one bemoans this evolution, one needs specific critiques of the body of current economic research, either because of limitations in this domain or because of desiccation as to how questions in the domain are analyzed. Banalities such as "Marx studied inequality and this is little taught," are an argument for history of thought courses, nothing more. Such substantive critiques do exist, of course. Brian Leiter @BrianLeiter does this in his great book with Jaime Edwards, Marx. Historians of capitalism do this as well; it is a huge loss to Chicago at Jonathan Levy @_jonlevy (his book The Real Economy is deeply insightful) has moved to Sciences Po. Whether or not I agree with all of their arguments is irrelevant, the point is that they make powerful arguments. This leads to 2. Any critique of Economics departments needs to account for the fact the universities are ecologies. There is much capacity to learn about Marxian thought in departments other than Economics at the University of Chicago. This reflects, IMO, the differential importance of the ideas to different disciplines. There are good reasons for specialization. 3, Any critique has to argue that there are scholars who active research programs matter for either enriching or expanding the domain of economics. Otherwise, one is arguing for intellectual diversity quotas that will not do anything substantive. I do not think Marxist economics is a flourishing area nor has been for a long time. It is noteworthy that leading radical economists moved away from Marxism. This matters in understanding the evolution of departments since the late 1960s and 1970s. As for my views on Marx, here is a public conversation that Geoff Wodtke and I had with Jaime Edwards and Brian Leiter on their book, where I present some of them.

State of Sociology This article is being lauded by the usual suspects. IMO it is a failure because it fails to recognize that sociology is producing much great research. Here are four examples of great books by sociologists published in 2025/2026 that rival those of any social scientists. For inequality, here are two books which I rank among the most important I have read in the last several years. Neither, IMO could have been written by an economist. The natural kinds undergirding their logic, the ways that evidence is evaluated, are essential complements to the ways that economists, including me, normally think. 1. Aaron Reeves @aaronsreeves and Sam Friedman @SamFriedmanSoc , Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite is a tour de force in analyzing the ways that British elites have reproduced themselves since the 1890s, finding relatively little changes in the rates of elite reproduction during this period. The book characterizes the ways that elites have evolved in the ways that they conceptualize themselves and present themselves to others. As such, Reeves and Friedman provide deep insights into the nature of intergenerational mobility and of meritocracy for Great Britain, past and present. All of this is done using an amazing array of qualitative and quantitative information that the authors constructed. 2. Michelle Jackson @mivich, The Division of Rationalized Labor is a remarkable analysis of the nature of modern jobs. The book argues that contrary to the classical idea that increasing division of labor would leads to job simplification, the modern economy has produced jobs of increasing complexity as a given position involves more complex and heterogeneous objectives. Teachers are one example that is discussed in detail. Michelle argues that rationalization of the economy facilitated by increased capacity to understand and measure how productivity of individuals and organizations is determined, underlies this evolution. This vision contains deep implications for labor market and intergenerational inequality. Methodology. These two books stand on par with the best econometrics texts. 3. Cristobal Young and Erin Cumberworth, Multiverse Analysis: Computational Methods for Robust Results defines an important frontier in the analysis of the effects of model assumptions on empirical claims, by constructing ways to communicate information about objects of interest across model spaces, which define different portfolios of assumptions. This vision of empirics is the next generation after model averaging, which has been important in the economic growth literature. 4. Geoffrey Wodtke and Xiang Zhou, Causal Mediation Analysis is a masterful synthesis and will become a standard citation and the essential reference for students and researchers. To be clear, my objection to the WSJ article and the way it is being is fully consistent with my endorsement of the Vanderbilt-Washington report. The fact that I know world class sociologists who have dropped their memberships in the American Sociological Association over its politicization (while many others have expressed misgivings to me) speaks volumes. But the idea that the field is a systematic failure is nonsense.

Not just top 25, but top 5. No film better captured the moral and social damage done by the Vietnam War to the United States. The one time in my life I walked out of a new movie and thought I had seen one of the best films ever made. And for me, no film has portrayed the US so critically.

On the economics/social science of religion Honored to have delivered the SCORE Strand 3 Keynote Lecture. The Social Consequences of Religions (SCORE) 3 Strand: Social Consequences of Religions initiative, directed by the extraordinary Sriya Iyer @SriyaIyer, is a broad integrative project and the occasion of the meeting with the release of Score 3 White Paper that will launch the next phase of the initiative. My talk "Intergenerational Persistence of Intergenerational Persistence in Religious Status: Some New Measures" had two distinct parts. First, I described work in progress with Kristina Butaeva @Butaeva_K, Renato De Angelis, and Weiqi Wang, which constructs measure of intergenerational persistence in religious status for the bulk of the post World War II period. We document changes in the dynamics of persistence using recently developed Markov Chain measures. These measures illustrate how the comparative persistence of evangelical Protestantism and no affiliation, compared to mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism, map to increasing cross sectional polarization. The methods we employ also allow us to dWe also find interesting gender differences. Second, I turn to the question of modelling the mechanisms underlying these mobility dynamics and make some general observations on the modelling of religious affiliation and religious belief using formal models. I do so from the vantage point of economic theory. I argue that it is essential to model religious affiliation and belief as the product of truth seeking. I contrast this with the focus on the role of identity and community public goods in religious affiliation that has been successfully modelled by economists. This leads me to argue that the modelling of belief has to avoid the fundamental (no pun intended) defect of the Strong Program in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: the requirement of symmetry, which David Bloor has described as "symmetrical in its style of explanation. The same types of cause would explain say, true and false beliefs." This position is, I claim, wrong to the extent it is nontrivial. My paper with William Brock, A Formal Model of Theory Choice in Science, 1999 is an example of how to integrate truth seeking with other determinants of belief in which asymmetries in explanation emerge as equilibrium properties of the belief distribution across scientists. I further argue that scientific, moral, and metaphysical truths need to be distinguished in the modelling process and further argue that, as a scientific and moral realist, were I to engage in the modelling, the truth or falsity of particular belief systems must be integral to the analysis. The recording of the lecture does not include the Q and A that followed my lecture. Here I raise the issue of viewpoint diversity. As someone who was raised with no religion and has no religion, I argued that my capacity to model religious belief is inevitably handicapped. I do not understand the qualia of religious belief and this matters.

James Robinson and I have edited a two part series Whither Meritocracy? for the American Academy of Political and Social Science. I am delighted that Part One: Conceptual Issues of Meritocracy, is now available. Here is the Table of Contents 1. David Miller, Meritocracy: A Qualified Defense 2. Daniel Markovits @DSMarkovits, How Meritocracy Became Self-Defeating 3. Steven Durlauf, Retrospective Versus Prospective Meritocracy 4. Glenn Loury @GlennLoury, The Limits of Meritocracy in a Racially Divided Society 5. Guido Alfani @guido_alfani, Meritocracy in Historical Perspective 6. David Lay Williams @LayWilliams, The Meritocracy Debate of the Eighteenth Century Meritocracy is a major dimension of research activity at the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility @UCStoneCenter. Daniel Markovits and I had a public conversation on his important book The Meritocracy Trap Four of our podcasts have particular focus on meritocracy. Episode #22#: Lauren Rivera @Laurenaudrie on Meritocracy and Its Failings Episode #54#: Leslie McCall @LeslieMcCallgc on Intersectional Inequality, AI, and Meritocracy Episode #58#: Thomas Mulligan on Acting Meritocratically Episode #59#: Jahel Queralt @jahelqueralt on the Costs of Moralizing Success and Failure

"Economic Models of Identity Formation and Cultural Transmission" is a brilliant literature synthesis who Alberto Bisin @albertobisin and Thierry Verdier @thierryverdier2, whose own contributions have defined the field. This is a wonderful demonstration of the successful integration of ideas from psychology and sociology into formal economic models. Invaluable for teaching and as a research reference.

The Baltimore Regional Housing Partnership provides rental vouchers to low income families into low poverty nonsegregated communities. The program also provides extensive counselling and assistance in the process of finding new homes This superb paper by Dionissi Aliprantis and Stefanie DeLuca @Stefanie_DeLuca document ability of the program to break racial and economic segregations in ways that dwarf what is seen in MTO, for example. They further identify a key reason for the program's efficacy: the BRHP functions at the metro area level, rather than a local one, which dramatically increases the opportunities made available to movers, providing an important general message for policy design.

The gateway course for the moral & political economy major at JHU @HopkinsCES in @SNFAgora “social theories of the economy” involves students reading 100-200 pages per week of hard material; students appreciate the high expectations & training in reading social theory & pol Econ.

The Baltimore Regional Housing Partnership provides rental vouchers to low income families into low poverty nonsegregated communities. The program also provides extensive counselling and assistance in the process of finding new homes This superb paper by Dionissi Aliprantis and Stefanie DeLuca @Stefanie_DeLuca document ability of the program to break racial and economic segregations in ways that dwarf what is seen in MTO, for example. They further identify a key reason for the program's efficacy: the BRHP functions at the metro area level, rather than a local one, which dramatically increases the opportunities made available to movers, providing an important general message for policy design.

"Economic Models of Identity Formation and Cultural Transmission" is a brilliant literature synthesis who Alberto Bisin @albertobisin and Thierry Verdier @thierryverdier2, whose own contributions have defined the field. This is a wonderful demonstration of the successful integration of ideas from psychology and sociology into formal economic models. Invaluable for teaching and as a research reference.

State of Sociology This article is being lauded by the usual suspects. IMO it is a failure because it fails to recognize that sociology is producing much great research. Here are four examples of great books by sociologists published in 2025/2026 that rival those of any social scientists. For inequality, here are two books which I rank among the most important I have read in the last several years. Neither, IMO could have been written by an economist. The natural kinds undergirding their logic, the ways that evidence is evaluated, are essential complements to the ways that economists, including me, normally think. 1. Aaron Reeves @aaronsreeves and Sam Friedman @SamFriedmanSoc , Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite is a tour de force in analyzing the ways that British elites have reproduced themselves since the 1890s, finding relatively little changes in the rates of elite reproduction during this period. The book characterizes the ways that elites have evolved in the ways that they conceptualize themselves and present themselves to others. As such, Reeves and Friedman provide deep insights into the nature of intergenerational mobility and of meritocracy for Great Britain, past and present. All of this is done using an amazing array of qualitative and quantitative information that the authors constructed. 2. Michelle Jackson @mivich, The Division of Rationalized Labor is a remarkable analysis of the nature of modern jobs. The book argues that contrary to the classical idea that increasing division of labor would leads to job simplification, the modern economy has produced jobs of increasing complexity as a given position involves more complex and heterogeneous objectives. Teachers are one example that is discussed in detail. Michelle argues that rationalization of the economy facilitated by increased capacity to understand and measure how productivity of individuals and organizations is determined, underlies this evolution. This vision contains deep implications for labor market and intergenerational inequality. Methodology. These two books stand on par with the best econometrics texts. 3. Cristobal Young and Erin Cumberworth, Multiverse Analysis: Computational Methods for Robust Results defines an important frontier in the analysis of the effects of model assumptions on empirical claims, by constructing ways to communicate information about objects of interest across model spaces, which define different portfolios of assumptions. This vision of empirics is the next generation after model averaging, which has been important in the economic growth literature. 4. Geoffrey Wodtke and Xiang Zhou, Causal Mediation Analysis is a masterful synthesis and will become a standard citation and the essential reference for students and researchers. To be clear, my objection to the WSJ article and the way it is being is fully consistent with my endorsement of the Vanderbilt-Washington report. The fact that I know world class sociologists who have dropped their memberships in the American Sociological Association over its politicization (while many others have expressed misgivings to me) speaks volumes. But the idea that the field is a systematic failure is nonsense.

This report outlines policies that will damage American science. 1. Many problems are asserted, yet no evidence is given of their importance. The gratuitous attacks on DEI are one example. In other cases, narratives about linear versus nonlinear scientific systems are too vague to mean anything. 2. A major thrust of the report is the transfer of government support from basic research to applied research. This is done without justification and misunderstands the scientific enterprise. 3. Redirection of resources from universities to individuals and the private sector will cause enormous damage to the overall scientific infrastructure of the country. 4. The report's proposals undermine processes of peer/professional review in favor of political control and oversight. The report opens the door to politicization of scientific funding and bureaucratic interference in the research process. It will implicitly create a high discount rate for valuing scientific progress. 5. The report ignores the importance of foreign born researchers in the American scientific enterprise. 6. The report ignores the importance of the level of government investment in science. Pieties about reducing bureaucracy, etc. are political pablum. I just signed this letter and urge others to do so.