About the Stone Center

Our Mission

The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center conducts and promotes quantitative research using inequality as a lens on society, the economy and politics.

The Senior Scholars, postdoctoral scholars, and students working within the Center share a commitment to scholarship that is data-driven, interdisciplinary, oriented toward policy and institutional change, and that addresses questions about inequality throughout the world.

Our core functions:

• Researching the causes, nature, and consequences of socio-economic inequality, with a specific mandate to expand research on wealth concentration at the top;

• Training and teaching new inequality scholars at the Graduate Center/CUNY across a number of academic disciplines;

• Participating in discussions and debates on inequality through public programs and collaboration with journalists;

• Engaging in special programs and projects such as the Inequality by the Numbers workshop​, the Lee Rainwater Lecture Series, the Stone Center Working Paper Series​, and the GC Wealth Project​; and

• Housing the U.S. Office of LIS, the renowned cross-national data center based in Luxembourg.

The Center was created in 2016 with a generous gift from the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation. The Stones wanted to see more research on wealth specifically — with a focus on the causes and consequences of wealth concentration at the top — an area that had, historically, received less attention and funding.

“America’s attachment to a market economy is robust, and I believe that its prosperity is well secured by our culture of challenge and innovation,” Jim Stone said in an interview following the creation of the Center. “There is a danger that we may find ourselves living in a market economy where a tiny fraction of the people and a small number of institutions reap far too great a share of the rewards. This would be a democracy in name only.”