Scholar Interviews

Stone Center Senior Scholar Branko Milanovic discusses the recent update of his All the Ginis (ATG) dataset, which now covers the period from 1950 to 2024 and includes 6,762 Ginis from 183 countries or territories. He also explains the continuing challenges in improving the production and collection of data on national income inequalities, and gives a warning about technological change.

Jakob Dirksen, a visiting researcher at the Stone Center who is based at the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford, discusses his current projects and research goals.

Stone Center Junior Scholar Jim Riungu discusses his work as an environmental lawyer and the need for more research on areas of environmental criminology in the Global South.

Stone Center Postdoctoral Scholar Naomi Crowther, an economist whose research focuses on topics such as gendered wealth inequality and the effects of forced displacement, discusses her recent working paper, her ongoing projects, and why she decided to earn a doctoral degree after working in research for international institutions.

Stone Center Junior Scholar and third-year doctoral student Paisley Shultz discusses her interest in industrial-organizational psychology and how it applies to questions related to socio-economic inequality, such as pay disclosure among coworkers.

Stone Center Junior Scholar and Ph.D. candidate Shou-Ming Chang, who worked as a legislative assistant in the parliament of Taiwan before coming to the Graduate Center, discusses his research, his interests in methods of measuring inequality, and what he learned from his government role.

Celina Su discusses her most recent book, Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities, which examines participatory budgeting, a process through which neighbors gather to discuss proposals for funding projects related to community interests.

Manuel Schechtl, a 2022–2024 Stone Center postdoctoral scholar, discusses his Stone Center Working Paper, which combines two new sources of data to compare the extent of democratic backsliding in all 50 U.S. states.

Affiliated Scholar Maximilian Kasy discusses his new book, The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits), which offers a convincing argument for democratic control over AI’s objectives.

Kenworthy, a professor of sociology and the Yankelovich Chair in Social Thought at the University of California, San Diego, discusses the findings in his latest book, which examines whether reducing income inequality would have beneficial effects on living standards, health, economic opportunity, the functioning of democracy, and subjective measures of happiness.