Haas Institute faculty on rising inequality, and the GOP tax bill

Leading economist Emmanuel Saez, who is a member of the Economic Disparities cluster, released a report last week he co-authored with a number of other experts that shows a trend of rising economic inequality, globally, over the past 37 years. The World Inequality Report suggests that national policies are key contributors to the levels of inequality in different countries. The report comes out as Congress votes to approve the GOP tax bill, which nearly all independent studies have shown will greatly benefit the super rich at the expense of the lower and middle classes. Read the report here, and a New Yorker article that ties the report to the GOP tax bill here.

Meanwhile, Robert Reich, another member of the Haas Institute's Economic Disparities cluster, has written multiple pieces calling for the defeat of the Republican tax bill, which is currently on its way to the president's desk for signing. In his most recent piece in the Huffington Post, Reich debunks popular claims used by supporters of the bill, including that it will help US companies be more competitive, and create jobs. In late-October, Reich was featured in a short video created by Inequality Media and Moveon.org attacking the bill as a Trojan Horse. More pieces by Reich on the tax bill and other issues can be viewed on his author's page at the SF Chronicle website here.

Separately, a third member of the Economic Disparities cluster, Paul Pierson, authored a long piece for the British Journal of Sociology that looks at the merger of populism and plutocracy to explain the ascendancy of Trump. The essay also touches on issues of inequality. Read that piece here.

Guest speakers reexamine US expansion, explore Black arts collectives

The Haas Institute rounded off its five-part Fall semester Research to Impact speaker series this month with a December 1 presentation by Princeton politics professor Paul Frymer, and a December 8 talk by poet Elizabeth Alexander, with a new set of speakers scheduled to appear starting next month. In his talk, Frymer drew themes from his recently-published book Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion, to demonstrate how the federal government throughout the late-18th and 19th centuries used land policy and selective immigration to engineer a white country. In the final event of the year, Alexander, the director of Creativity and Free Expression at the Ford Foundation, looked at Black arts collectives, and some ways in which Black art eulogizes, remembers, and makes ancestral references to death and violence.

A video, write-up, and transcript of Frymer's talk are available here, while a video and transcript of Alexander's talk can be viewed here. For videos, write-ups, and transcripts of other past Research to Impact events, and to see a list of upcoming speakers for Spring, visit this page.

California adopts 'opportunity maps' for future housing projects

As a result of a collaboration between the Haas Institute and several other research and advocacy organizations, the largest low-income housing program in the state will utilize opportunity maps starting in 2018 as part of the siting criteria for new housing projects for families with children. Last week, the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee (TCAC) voted to adopt the opportunity maps into the 2018 regulations to promote low-income families’ access to high-amenity neighborhoods. Read more here.

Richard Rothstein presents on the Color of Law in Cleveland

Senior Fellow Richard Rothstein presented his critically acclaimed book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America to an audience in Cleveland earlier this month. The City Club of Cleveland had hosted Rothstein for a discussion about housing, segregation, and education since the US Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling which outlawed segregation in schools. Rothstein is currently helping organize the Haas Institute's Kerner Commission at 50 Conference at UC Berkeley set for late-February. Watch a video of Rothstein's talk in Cleveland here, and read more about the Kerner Commission Conference here.

Fellow Josh Clark publishes chapter on '67 UN convention on racial discrimination

The Haas Institute's Tides Fellow Josh Clark authored a chapter in a volume published this month that looks at the United Nations' 1967 International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. The convention sought to have signatories work towards ending racial discrimination in their countries, and adopt laws prohibiting hate speech. Clark's chapter of the volume, titled "Knowing and Doing with Numbers: Disaggregated Data in the Work of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination," examines changes in the approach of the committee in charge of overseeing the implementation of the convention from the early days to the contemporary. 

Preview the volume and find links to vendors here.

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