This month, Bilyana Petrova and Marco Ranaldi, the Stone Center’s first two postdoctoral scholars, are completing their two-year terms and preparing to start new positions: Petrova as an assistant professor of political science at Texas Tech University, and Ranaldi as a lecturer in Economics at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
Petrova and Ranaldi started their postdocs onsite at the Stone Center in New York before the outbreak of the pandemic led both to return to Europe. We spoke to Petrova remotely in Florence, where in addition to carrying out research on economic inequality and redistribution in Europe, she has spent her early mornings and evenings capturing spectacular views of the city, and to Ranaldi in Rome, where he has been working on both the country-level and global dimension of income composition inequality.
The Florence skyline, shot by Bilyana Petrova during her time in Italy
What surprised you the most about the Stone Center?
Ranaldi: What really unites everyone at the Stone Center is a broad and at the same time very specific focus on economic inequality. This is an interesting feature of the center, and it makes it very different from other research centers. We’re all talking about the same topic that interests all of us, even though we’re coming from different backgrounds, different academic points of view, and by means of different methodologies.
Another thing I really appreciated and enjoyed about the Stone Center is its size — in terms of the number of researchers, staff, and administrators — and the extent to which it is impactful. This combination was interesting, because it allowed me to experience multiple aspects of working in a research center. I never felt like the sort of researcher who is isolated doing his own task, which is research, which is the reason why he was hired, and all the rest happens thanks to other people working on other things. I’ve really felt involved in different parts of the processes that makes a research center run, and this gave me a sense of what you need to know, and the care you need to put into every single aspect, whether it’s building up a working paper series and disseminating it in various forms, or finding ways to establish multidisciplinary work.
Petrova: I completely agree. And for me, three things stand out. The first, which echoes what Marco said, is that for the first time in my academic career, I have been a part of a center that is at the same time multidisciplinary and committed to one thematic focus. I have worked in strongly interdisciplinary environments in the past, and I have always found them particularly enriching, because you can see how different disciplines and sciences approach specific topics. But never have I seen such a strong underlying current that unites everyone, and that is a common interest in understanding economic inequality. I’ve learned so much about different types of inequality — about the causes and consequences of social and income differentials, about the policies that one can adopt to address these differentials, and about the attitudes and behaviors that they engender. That has been exceptionally fulfilling and my knowledge of the field has substantially broadened.
Second, I enjoyed learning more about how to connect to the local community. I think that CUNY, the Graduate Center in general, and the Stone Center in particular really attempt to reach a broader audience and to keep people informed about important issues having to do with inequality. And this is something I had not previously been so cognizant of: how exactly do you reach people, how do you get them excited and interested in the topics you specialize in, how do you make them realize the importance of these topics and the potential that these issues have to change society and to shape the way that we perceive reality? Seeing that has been eye-opening, in many ways.
And then lastly, Marco and I participated in the creation of a multidisciplinary seminar series. We gained first-hand experience in organizing a research forum that is open to people at different stages of their careers who are interested in inequality. Getting in touch with so many colleagues, who come from various backgrounds and have different experiences to share, has been truly wonderful because it allowed us to learn so much about topics that we wouldn’t have necessarily been exposed to if we had stayed within our departments.
The pandemic struck New York City in your second semester. How were you able to continue your research and stay connected during the shutdown?
Petrova: I thought the pandemic was going to be a very isolating experience. And what really surprised me was that the center was very eager to stay in touch and to make sure we remained part of a community. I really appreciated that, because I got to know everybody much better, and this alleviated the stress of my moves [first home to Bulgaria and then to Florence].
I think that for me and Marco this pandemic involved a double movement, both geographical and digital. I was taking classes in the spring and that helped me stay in touch with Leslie and Janet [the associate director and director of the Stone Center]. I had several meetings with them over the summer. And once we started the seminar series, it became much easier for everybody to see each other every week, and to have the discussions and conversations we would normally have at the library or just passing by each others’ offices.
Miles [one of the six Stone Center senior scholars] reached out to all four postdocs in early September of 2020 — he wanted to meet Jackie and Bennett and to keep in touch with me and Marco. We created a virtual coffee hour, where every week we would hang out and discuss developments in our own lives. At the beginning, it was about haircuts, going to the store, missing working from coffee shops, and organizing virtual job talks. That was particularly helpful for me, because I had a practice job talk with them before an important interview in the fall. The isolation that the pandemic brought about was lessened because we stayed so connected.
Ranaldi: With respect to staying connected, I can only echo Bili’s points, and add just one other thing that has been extremely important: the fact that I was collaborating, as Bili did, with other members of the center on research. These collaborations — in my case, with [Stone Center Senior Scholar] Branko and [director of The GC Wealth Project] Salvatore — gave me good reasons to stay in touch, in addition to the fact that we had coffee breaks together or we were organizing a seminar series. I just want to highlight that, thankfully, the possibility to work online is real thing, at least for a researcher doing theoretical work.
What advice do you have for Ph.D. students who might be looking to follow a similar path — to get a postdoc or a tenure-track position? The pandemic has made the academic job market even tighter than usual.
Ranaldi: My expectation is that this difficulty, due to the pandemic, to find positions will continue to be the case for at least the next two to three years, especially in the United States. Lately we have seen a huge reduction in job openings in the United States, which has basically pushed all the top market candidates in the U.S. to look for positions in Europe, and therefore positions in Europe have become extremely crowded and this has complicated the situation.
I think it’s important that candidates looking for positions should be willing to accept transitional positions, like postdoc positions, instead of jumping into something more established like a lecturer or an assistant professor position in the next two, three years.
Petrova: I agree that the next several years will be difficult, mainly because of the uncertainty that this pandemic has brought about. At the same time, I feel that now that universities know they can handle the transition to online work, and also now that the rollout of the vaccine has been so successful in the U.S., a lot of universities feel more confident when it comes to hiring faculty.
This is a very difficult moment, and all advice will sound empty to those who are struggling. But I think three things are important. First, I do think that people on the market need to remember at all times that their worth is not related to their job-market prospects. Landing a job or not does not in any way reflect on their talents, their abilities, or their value as a human being. The structural constraints right now are formidable.
Second, I think it is more important than ever for Ph.D. students to love what they do. And here I’m not only thinking of their own work, but also of the other activities that they engage in, such as hobbies, extracurriculars, family time, the days they spend with loved ones.
Lastly, I’d like to echo Marco’s point that it is very important for people to stay open to different opportunities, because nowadays it’s increasingly common for finishing Ph.D. candidates or young career researchers to move quite a lot. Being open to that prospect, to spending a couple of years or more not having a permanent position, is very difficult, but at the same time provides a buffer for those who don’t land a tenure-track position straight out of graduate school. And we never know what a move will bring. Sometimes it is undoubtedly connected to new challenges, but at the same time you have the chance to explore new environments, to learn from new colleagues, to get to know other disciplines, to diversify and broaden your own horizons — and that, for me, has been exceptionally valuable.
What trends do you see emerging in the field of inequality studies?
Ranaldi: I think the field is increasingly moving toward something very simple, which is doing empirical work. Basically, assembling new databases, exploiting and looking for new data sources to extrapolate information about the distribution of economic wealth. I see the field being led by new sources of data to extrapolate novel information, more than the other way around. In other words, I see the potential of finding new empirical trends about the dynamics of income and wealth inequality is of utmost importance to inform potential future theoretical frameworks, which are currently lacking in the field. I think there will be a period in which these new trends will continue to be developed, and at some point all of these trends will be, to a certain extent, put together to advance a new theoretical framework that embeds all of them.
In terms of subject matter, I think the field of global inequality will gain even more relevance, because we still know very little about it. By global inequality, I mean to what extent individuals’ incomes are distributed across the world, after having adjusted all these incomes so that we can compare the level across countries and across years. Basically, there will be a focus on improving the understanding of this distribution, and better understanding why this is relevant for understanding our economies. With the novel trends that have been produced from global inequality research, we can already see something extremely important about the global imbalances between different countries, different growth rate differentials, and the extent these different growth rate differentials are equalizing, or even diverging, incomes between people — with political consequences, as well as different bargaining powers of individuals when they move from one country to another. I think this is very interesting.
And I think it’s extremely important to understand the dichotomy between capital and labor. Something that seems to emerge, which is completely different than several years ago, is that now we don’t see a stark separation between the rich earning from capital and the poor earning from labor. We see something much more in-between. And so the question is: what happens when those at the very top of the distribution not only earn capital income, which implies that they accumulate wealth and then they transmit wealth to the next generation, but they also accumulate human capital by high labor incomes, which is of course tied to the fact that they are highly skilled workers?
In this respect, they not only accumulate wealth; they also accumulate human capital that is passed to the next generation. Will this amplify income disparities in the long run, since you have this sort of double transmission of advantages, from the side of wealth and from the side of human capital? This is a new thing in the United States: the share of people belonging to the top of the capital and labor distribution is rising. So I think this is relevant because it’s likely to change a lot of things.
Petrova: I see the direction in which our current work is going as very exciting. When it comes to methodological approaches, political scientists are increasingly preoccupied with causal inference, or causally identifying the effect of particular variables on outcomes of interest. More and more we see original experimental work, original surveys, or natural experiments that attempt to gain greater causal leverage.
When it comes to specific substantive poli-sci, I think that we are moving away from the original interest in income inequality per se into different aspects of economic inequality. Political scientists have taken note of wealth inequality, housing inequality, and the overlap between different types of income and socioeconomic differentials. They are now trying to figure out how these different aspects of inequality drive an increasing number of outcomes of interest, such as voting behavior, preferences for economic redistribution, political participation, and the rise of anti-systemic players.
The growing research on perceptions is very interesting. We see that sometimes existing aggregate-level numbers don’t really capture how people feel about their trajectory relative to other people’s trajectories, and their standing relative to others’ standing — whether they have gained or lost relative to where they were in the past, or whether they’re richer or poorer than their neighbors. We can only be excited about what we will find out about how our social reality is shaped.