Proseminar on Inequality and Social Policy I: Fall 2013
Inequality & Social Policy Proseminar I: Fall 2013 -- Revised 8/29/2013 1
Proseminar on Inequality and Social Policy I: Fall 2013
Listed in FAS as Government 2340a and in HKS as Social and Urban Policy 921
Wednesdays 2 to 4pm in CGIS South S-050 (except Sept 11 in CGIS Knafel K-354)
Website: http://tinyurl.com/gov2340a
Instructors: Christopher (Sandy) Jencks Theda Skocpol
Offices: Taubman 414 CGIS Knafel K416
Phones: 617-495-0546 617-496-0966
Email:
Office hours: Email for an appointment Email for an appointment
Assistants: Jessica McClanahan Mary Abigail Peck (Abby)
Offices Taubman 459B CGIS Knafel K418
Phones: 617-495-8763 617-496-0966
Email:
Administrative Details:
Jointly offered by FAS and HKS, the Proseminar on Inequality and Social Policy is a required three-semester sequence for second and third year doctoral students in Government and Social Policy, Sociology and Social Policy, and the Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy. FAS designates the first semester as Government 2340a and the second semester as Sociology 296b. HKS designates the first semester as SUP-921 and the second semester as SUP-922. Instructors for the second semester will be Jason Beckfield (Sociology) and Amitabh Chandra (HKS). Spring 2014 course meeting time is TBD. The third semester (Fall 2014) will meet on Mondays from 2 to 4 pm. This cannot be changed, so keep it free when planning next year’s courses.
All students need permission from one of the instructors to take the class, but that is automatic if you are required to take it. If that is the case, bring the forms you need signed to the first meeting.
Although we normally have room for a few additional students, the number of students required to take the class jumped dramatically this year, leaving no room for anyone else. We hope this problem will prove temporary and that we will be able to admit a few others next year.
The first class will meet from 2:10 to 4:00 pm on Wednesday, Sept 4. This will be a regular class, largely devoted to pages 1-265 of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. You should read Kahneman during August and email a memo of no more than 500 words to Professors Jencks and Skocpol about it by midnight on Monday, Sept 2. The memo should discuss how the cognitive processes that Kahneman discusses have affected your own work and the field in which you are pursuing a doctorate.
Overview of Fall 2013:
The proseminar will have four main objectives this semester:
1. Familiarizing you with some of the key policy choices that affect the distribution of income in rich democracies.
2. Examining what we know and what we can perhaps learn about the political, economic, social, psychological, and cultural causes and consequences of income inequality.
3. Helping you develop a more interdisciplinary view of the world.
4. Helping you select a topic for a potentially publishable paper on a policy-related question about inequality. We define a “policy-related question” as one with obvious implications for some actual or potential government policy.
Jencks will lead the first six classes (Sept 4 through Oct 9), which will focus on how economic inequality might affect a variety of economic, social, and biological outcomes. Skocpol will lead the next six classes (Oct 16 through Nov 20), which will focus on distributional politics in the United States.
Memos. You will be expected to write eight memos of 500 words or less about the readings: one for the first class (Sept 4), three for any of the next five classes (Sept 11 through Oct 9), and four for any of the last six classes (Oct 16 through Nov 20).
The Reading List contains both required and recommended readings. You should read all the required papers. You should also read at least the abstract of each recommended paper and take it into account in your memos when it is relevant.
Both class memos and class discussion should cover at least three issues:
1. Important methodological questions about the validity of the empirical claims made in the assigned papers. The emphasis here is on “important.” The goal is not to rehearse all the things that can possibly go wrong in data analysis, but to focus on things that are likely to bias a paper’s conclusions enough to really matter.
2. Policy implications, either explicit or implicit, of the readings. Under what conditions, if any, are those implications likely to apply?
3. Differences that deserve discussion in the assumptions of different disciplines about how the world works, as seen in either the readings or your classmates’ memos.
Memos are due by 11:59pm on Mondays. Since the main purpose of the memos is to improve the quality of class discussion, late memos will not count.
You are all expected to read one another’s memos, so you should email your own memos to the entire class. You should have received a distribution list. If you didn’t, contact Jessica McClanahan.
Instructors will use email subject lines to file these memos, so your subject lines need to follow a common format. The subject line should read:
“[YOUR NAME] - Proseminar memo for [SEMINAR DATE]”
Give the date of the seminar, not the date on which you are writing the memo.
Please do not send your memos as attachments. Paste them into your email message as text.
Discussion leaders: We will need two students to co-lead class discussions in eleven classes this semester. Since there are 17 of you, four of you will need to lead two classes. We will use a random selection system to choose the lucky four, and you will have first choice of classes to lead.
Discussion co-leaders should prepare a one page outline identifying issues raised in the readings and memos that they think deserve class discussion. Outlines should be selective, not exhaustive. Discussion leaders should meet briefly with the instructor on the Tuesday before class to go over their plans. They should then modify the outline as appropriate and bring one copy for each student to class. Discussion leaders should keep their initial comments to five minutes. Your main job is to ensure that discussion moves from one item to the next in a timely way and ends at 3:00 pm.
Discussion leaders are also responsible for bringing cookies. Keep your receipts. I will reimburse you and recover the money from HKS.
Format of classes: Classes will start promptly at 2:10. We will normally devote the first half of the class to discussing the assigned readings and memos. After a ten minute break, we will spend the second half of the class on the readings for the following week. Jencks and Skocpol will lead this part of the class, focusing on why the questions addressed in the next week’s readings are important, what other related literature not on the reading list shows, and what you need to know in order to assess the authors’ claims.
We will also have two extra classes during Reading Period, in which students will describe the research they plan to do for their papers. Faculty and students will then make suggestions. These classes will meet on Dec 4 and Dec 11 and will run until 5pm.
Grades: Semester grades will be pase 50% on your paper, 35% on your memos, and 15% on your class participation and your management of the class discussion when it is your turn.
Access to Readings:
Reserve Reading List: The Reserve Reading List page on the course website lists all required and recommended readings (in assignment order) and provides either a “Hollis Record” link or a “Digital Version” link for each item. A few items have both. Most books and book chapters have a “Hollis Record” link which goes to the Hollis Holdings/Availability page showing checkout status for the copy of the book on reserve for Government 2340a in Lamont Library as well as for all other copies of the book in Harvard’s various libraries. Journal articles and some unpublished readings have a “Digital Version” link which goes (via Hollis) directly to the full-text online version of the reading. Items which have both a Hollis Record link and a Digital Version link are books and book chapters for which the Harvard Library has obtained access to full-text online versions.
Books: All are on order at the Coop and on reserve at Lamont Library. Listed in assignment order:
Required:
Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz. The Race between Education and Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Theda Skocpol. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Jacob Hacker. The Divided Welfare State: The Battle Over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, editors. Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005.
Suzanne Mettler. The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Andrea Louise Campbell, How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Maria Cancian and Sheldon Danziger, editors. Changing Poverty, Changing Policies. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009.
Recommended:
Martin Gilens. Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
NOTE: Entire book is available via Hollis as an eBook.
Sourcebook: There is no sourcebook for this course.
Journal articles and some unpublished readings: Links to online full-text journal articles and some unpublished readings are on the Reserve Reading List page of the course website.
Book chapters:
1. For these book chapters, the entire book is available in digital format via Hollis.
Wed. Sept 25: Maarten Berg and Ruut Veenhoven. 2009. “Income Inequality and Happiness in 119 Countries: In Search for an Optimum that Does Not Appear to Exist.” In Bent Greve, ed., Happiness and Social Policy in Europe. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, pp. 174-194.
Wed. Oct 9: Larry Bartels. 2008. Unequal Democracy: The Politics of the New Gilded Age. Princeton and Russell Sage. Read Chapter 9.
Wed. Nov 13: Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, “Redistribution in the United States and Europe: The Data,” Chapter 2 in Alesina and Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe: A World of Difference. Oxford University Press, 2004.
2. For these book chapters, use the Scan&Deliver link in the book’s Hollis Holdings/Availability page to submit a request to library staff to scan the chapter and email you a pdf of it within 1-4 business days.
Wed. Oct 2: Sean Reardon. 2011. “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap between the Rich and the Poor,” pp. 91-116 in Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane, eds., Whither Opportunity? New York: Russell Sage Foundation and Spencer Foundation.
Wed. Nov 20: Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, “Hard-Fought Legacy: Obama, Congressional Democrats, and the Struggle for Comprehensive Health Care Reform,” pp. 53-104 in Reaching for a New Deal, edited by Theda Skocpol and Lawrence R. Jacobs (Russell Sage Foundation, 2011).
Note these additional parameters for S&D requests: “Libraries will process two S&D requests per patron per business day. Patrons may request up to one journal article or one book chapter per request. Requests are filled in the order in which they are received, within 1-4 business days. There are no rush orders.”
3. These book chapters are NOT available in digital format via Hollis. The books are on reserve at Lamont Library and the Hollis Record link in the Reserve Reading List shows their checkout status.
Wed. Oct 2 (recommended): Sarah Voitchovsky. 2009. “Inequality and Economic Growth,” pp. 549-574 in Wiemer Salverda, Brian Nolan, and Timothy Smeeding, eds., Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Wed. Oct 2: Christopher Jencks and Laura Tach. 2006. “Would Equal Opportunity Mean More Mobility?” pp. 23-58 in Stephen Morgan, David Grusky, and Gary Fields, eds., Mobility and Inequality: Frontiers of Research in Sociology and Economics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Research Papers:
All students should plan to spend a significant amount of time this fall choosing a topic for their research paper, reviewing the relevant literature, identifying the evidence they plan to use, and getting permission either to use the data (if it already exists) or to collect the data (if access requires permission).
First Semester Paper Deadlines:
Tuesday, Oct 8: Send both Jencks and Skocpol a one or two sentence description of three possible paper topics. Make an appointment to meet with one of us before Wednesday, Oct 16 to discuss these topics.
Tuesday, Nov 12: Submit your preferred paper topic. Include a paragraph about each of the following:
1. Why is your question important and policy relevant?
2. What work has already been done on the question you propose to address?
3. What you think you can add to current knowledge about the question.
4. A description of the evidence you plan to use. If you plan to analyze existing data, you should have figured out whether you can get access to it, whether it really contains the information you need, and whether it includes enough cases with the right characteristics to answer the question that interests you. If you plan to collect your own data, you should have begun to investigate whether you can get access to the site(s) where you want to work.
Monday, Dec 2: Send everyone in the seminar a two sentence description of your paper.
Wednesday, Dec 4 and 11: Student presentations. Classes will run until 5pm.
Friday, Dec 20: Submit Parts 1 and 2 of your paper. Part 1 should be a short introduction (under 1000 words) that describes the question you propose to answer, explains why it is relevant to public policy, and describes the evidence you will use to investigate it. Part 2 should be a literature review of no more than 2,500 words. The goal of the literature review is not to show that you have read everything that is relevant to your topic but to describe what we know and what you suspect about the specific empirical question you will try to answer.