SOC 220: Inequality, Mobility, and the American Dream

SOC 220: Inequality, Mobility, and the American Dream Precept Syllabus, Spring 2015 Sophie Moullin Fridays, 10 10.50 and 11-11.50 AM Location Wallace, 165 Contact Email: smoullin@princeton.edu Office: Wallace Hall, Room 284 Office hours: Thursday 2.30-3.30 pm, or by appointment. Purpose The purpose of this course is to critically engage with arguments and empirical evidence on economic inequality and social mobility. The course is an introduction to the sociological study of how income and wealth structure opportunities within and across generations. However, throughout the course sociological explanations are considered alongside those from economics. While we focus on the United States, we will often consider it in comparative perspective. Precept is a time for you to refine and articulate your reactions to the readings and to learn from those of your peers. It is also an opportunity to work through theoretical and methodological challenges encountered in the readings. The aim is to prepare you to become critical consumers of academic research, and public commentary and policy, related to this issue. Precept will also help prepare you to produce your own paper on a topic of your choosing related to economic inequality and/or social mobility. This will be due on Dean s Date, May 12 th. Over the semester you are required to write three brief reflection papers synthesizing the readings for a given week. These are due by noon Thursday, the day before precept. You may choose the weeks you wish to write on, but at least one must be completed before the midterm exam. 1

Precept Schedule and Readings: Week 1 February 6 No Precept Week 2 February 13 Economic Inequality: Theory and Principles Corak, Miles. 2013. Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility. The Journal of Economic Perspectives 27 (3): 79-102. Solon, Gary. 2008. Intergenerational Income Mobility in Steven Durlauf and Lawrence Blume (eds.), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition. Macmillan Krueger, Alan B. 2005. Inequality: Too Much of a Good Thing? in James J. Heckman and Alan B. Krueger (eds.), Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? MIT Press, pp. 1-76. Sen, Amartya K. 1997. From Income Inequality to Economic Inequality. Southern Economic Journal 64 (2): 384-401 Week 3 February 20 Social Mobility: Theory and Principles Hout, Michael. 2015. A Summary of What We Know about Social Mobility. Annals of the American Association of Political and Social Science 657: 27-36. Breen, Richard. 2004. Statistical Methods of Mobility Research in Richard Breen (ed.) Social Mobility in Europe. Oxford University Press, pp. 17-36. Blau, Peter M. and Otis Dudley Duncan. 2007. The Process of Stratification in David B. Grusky and Sonja Szelenyi (eds.) The Inequality Reader: Contemporary and Foundational Readings in Race, Class and Gender. Westview Press, pp. 428-41. Davis, Kingsley and Wilbur E. Moore. 1945. Some Principles of Stratification. American Sociological Review 10: 242-249. Week 4 February 27 Sociological Explanations Breen, Richard. 2005. Foundations of a Neo-Weberian Class Analysis in Erik Olin Wright (ed.) Approaches to Class Analysis. Cambridge University Press, pp. 31-50. Erikson, Robert and John G. Goldthorpe. 1992. The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies. Clarendon Press, pp. 28-47. DiMaggio, Paul. 1982. Cultural Capital and School Success: The Impact of Status Culture Participation on the Grades of U.S. High School Students. American Sociological Review 47 (2): 189-201. Grusky, David B. and Kim A. Weeden. 2006. Does the Sociological Approach to Studying Social Mobility Have a Future? in Stephen L. Morgan, David B. Grusky, and Gary S. Fields (eds.) Mobility and Inequality: Frontiers of Research in Sociology and Economics. Stanford University Press, pp. 85-108. 2

Week 5 March 6 Economic Explanations Becker, Gary S. 1981. A Treatise on the Family. Harvard University Press, pp. 135-66. Solon, Gary. 2004. A Model of Intergenerational Mobility Variation Over Time and Place in Miles Corak (ed.) Generational Income Mobility in North America and Europe. Cambridge University Press, pp. 38-47 Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Chapter 11: Merit and Inheritance in the Long-Run, (and other excerpts TBA). Selected responses to Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Week 6 March 13* The US in Historical and Comparative Perspective *No Precept (In-Class Midterm Exam, March 12th) Beller, Emily and Michael Hout. 2006. Intergenerational Social Mobility: The United States in Comparative Perspective. The Future of Children 16: 19-36. Ferrie, Joseph P. 2005. The End of American Exceptionalism? Mobility in the United States Since 1850. Journal of Economic Perspectives 19: 199-215. March 14-22 SPRING BREAK Week 7 March 27 Families and Genes Björklund, Anders and Jäntti, M. 2009. Intergenerational Income Mobility and the Role of Family Background. Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality. Oxford University Press, pp. 491-521. Sacerdote, Bruce. 2007. How Large are the Effects from Changes in Family Environment? A Study of Korean American Adoptees. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 122: 119-57. Swift, Adam 2005. Justice, Luck, and the Family: The Intergenerational Transmission of Economic Advantage from a Normative Perspective in Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and Melissa Osborne Groves (eds.) Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success. Princeton University Press, pp. 256-76. April 2: One paragraph description of final paper topic due Week 8 April 3 Demographic and Multigenerational approaches Beller, Emily. 2009. Bringing Intergenerational Social Mobility Research into the Twenty-First Century: Why Mothers Matter. American Sociological Review 74 (4): 507-528. Tach, Laura. 2015. Social Mobility in an Era of Family Instability and Complexity. Annals of the American Association of Political and Social Science 657: 83-96. 3

Mare, Robert D. 2011. A Multigenerational View of Inequality. Demography 48 (1): 1-23. Clark, Gregory. 2014. Your Ancestors, Your Fate. Published in The New York Times February 21, 2014. Week 9 April 10 Differences Across Groups Bloome, Deirdre and Bruce Western. 2011. Cohort Change and Racial Differences in Educational and Income Mobility. Social Forces 90 (2): 375-395. Isaacs, Julia B. 2007. Economic Mobility of Black and White Families in Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America published by The Brookings Institution. Pages 70-79. Duncan, Brian and Stephen J. Trejo. 2015. Assessing the Socioeconomic Mobility and Integration of U.S. Immigrants and Their Descendants. Annals of the American Association of Political and Social Science 657: 108-135. Week 10 April 17 Differences Across Places Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendre, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez. Forthcoming. Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States. Quarterly Journal of Economics. Clampet-Lundquist, Susan and Douglas S. Massey. 2008. Neighborhood Effects on Economic Self-Sufficiency: A Reconsideration of the Moving to Opportunity Experiment. American Journal of Sociology 114 (1): 107-143. Beckfield, Jason. 2006. European Integration and Income Inequality. American Sociological Review 71 (6): 964-985. Clark, Rob. 2011. World Income Inequality in the Global Era: New Estimates, 1990-2008. Social Problems 58 (4): 565-592. Week 11 April 24 Education Excerpts from: Goldin, Claudia and Lawrence F. Katz. 2008. The Race Between Education and Technology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Heckman, James J. 2006. Skill Formation and the Economics of Investing in Disadvantaged Children. Science 312 (5782): 1900-1902. Hoxby, Caroline M. and Christopher Avery. 2012. The Missing One-Offs : The Hidden Supply of High- Achieving, Low Income Students. NBER Working Paper 18586. Tough, Paul. 2014. Who Gets To Graduate? Published in The New York Times May 15, 2014. 4

Week 12 May 1 The Politics of Inequality and Mobility Excerpts from: Hacker, Jacob S. and Paul Pierson. 2010. Winner-Take-All Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster. McCall, Leslie and Jeff Manza. 2011. Class Differences in Social and Political Attitudes in America in Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro (eds.) Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media, pp. 552-570. New York: Oxford University Press. Jencks, Christopher, and Laura Tach. 2006. Would Equal Opportunity Mean More Mobility? in Stephen L. Morgan, David B. Grusky and Gary S. Fields (eds.) Mobility and Inequality: Frontiers of Research in Sociology. Stanford University Press, pp. 23-58. May 12 th : Final Paper due 5

Getting the most out of precepts Attendance: Consistent with University policy, precept attendance is mandatory. Absences are excused with advanced notice for illness, family emergencies, and religious holidays. In the case of second or further absences, a short report on the readings is required. Courtesy: In this small-group discussion setting, it is important to keep distractions at bay. To help you avoid distracting yourself and others, any laptops, phones and tablets used must be set on airplane mode. Please arrive to precept on time and do not leave early. Expectations: Attendance and participation in precept comprises 15% of your course grade. An A grade represents active participation in, and insightful contribution to, discussion. Participation entails: 1. Careful reading of the assigned texts. For a productive discussion, it is essential that each student has closely read the material assigned for that week. You should be able to provide a concise summary of each reading. Note down points in the readings you struggled with. This material is challenging, and we will work together in precept to understand authors methods, concepts and arguments. 2. Critical thinking about the readings. Critical reading goes beyond distilling the major arguments of a text, to questioning their basis and implications. When you come to precept, be prepared to raise questions about and to the week s readings. 3. A conversation. Listen carefully to others contributions, and respond to them respectfully. Questions to consider when preparing for precept: How do the readings relate to other readings for the week or to other readings from the course? In what ways are they similar or different? How do the readings relate to the material presented in lecture? Does it illustrate a certain point? How? Does it contradict it? In what ways? Are there any issues related to the readings that, in your view, remain unexplored or insufficiently addressed? Do you think that the author argued his or her point well and supported it with good evidence? If so, what are some of the examples? If not, what could the author have done otherwise to be more convincing? Can you think of counter arguments that the author did not consider? What are some of the issues that relate to the week s lecture or readings that still remain unclear or puzzling to you? 6