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The Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy’s faculty, staff, research fellows, and students are committed to achieving a deeper understanding of the barriers we face to greater equality and access to opportunities for all. Through rigorous research, quantitative and qualitative in nature, we offer policy solutions that have the potential to reduce or eliminate barriers and improve people’s lives. 

Spotlight

 

A new HKS Magazine article on inequality research at HKS features a number of Malcolm Wiener Center faculty and programs, including Gordon Hanson and the Reimagining the Economy project; the Stone ProgramDavid Deming and the Project on Workforce; and Daniel Schneider and the Shift Project.

 

The Economics for Inclusive Prosperity Conference will be livestreamed for virtual participants on March 30th and 31st. The conference brings together leading scholars committed to generating innovative policy ideas to address pressing issues such as rising inequality and macroeconomic instability. 

 

In his Q&A with the Malcolm Wiener Center, Dani Rodrik discusses the upcoming inaugural Economics for Inclusive Prosperity (EfIP) conference and how economics can be a tool for creating inclusive societies.

 

Workers without college degrees are being left behind and solving this problem will require new ways of thinking. To address this, Gordon Hanson says policymakers will have to consider approaches that were once thought too economically intrusive. Hanson is the co-director of Reimagining the Economy.

 

Research by Marcella Alsan, Crystal Yang, and colleagues published in the New England Journal of Medicine reviews the perilous state of health care in U.S. correctional facilities and the constraints on legal rights to treatment. The authors propose two changes that could safeguard these rights.

 

On February 27, the Institute of Politics hosted Cornell William BrooksYanilda María González, and Malcolm Wiener Center Director Sandra Susan Smith to discuss the continuing problem of police violence in communities of color and Americans’ responses to it.

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The Gender Wage Gap and Devaluation of Women’s Work

Daniel Schneider and the Shift Project find that gender segregation between companies contributes significantly to the gender wage gap in the service sector. The study, inWork and Occupations, also finds that this gender wage gap leads to women receiving both less in pay and fewer working hours.

A sheriff stands in front of an American flag and a screen with a bar graph.

Calculating the True Cost of Crime and Punishment

A new course, A Performance Evaluation of the Criminal Legal System, asked students to gather public and internal budgeting data to determine whether the criminal legal system is effective enough to justify the costs and the harm that it perpetrates on the most marginalized people in society.

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2023 Malcolm Wiener Lecture with Gillian Tett

Gillian Tett presented the 2023 Malcolm H. Wiener Lecture in International Political Economy: "From Tunnel Vision to Lateral Vision; How Anthropology can help us all make (better) sense of global risks." Gillian Tett is chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large, US of the Financial Times.

A windmill.

Avoiding Job Loss in the Transition to Renewable Energy

In the shift to green energy, Gordon Hanson says policymakers must act now to blunt job losses by being prepared to offer help to workers affected by mass layoffs. He discussed his paper written for the Aspen Economic Strategy Group in a webinar with John Podesta, Senior Advisor to the President. 

Programs and Initiatives

The Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management draws from rigorous research as well as insights from practitioners and people from impacted communities to inform the development of fairer and more just criminal legal system policies, practices, and procedures.

The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality and Social Policy unites faculty, students, and researchers from across Harvard University and beyond to address the causes and consequences of wealth inequalities in different populations around the world.

The Project on Workforce is an interdisciplinary, collaborative project with Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education charting the course for a post-secondary system of the future that creates more and better pathways to economic mobility.

The Shift Project, a joint project at Harvard Kennedy School and UCSF, examines the nature and consequences of precarious employment in the service sector with a focus on how policymakers and firms can improve job quality.

The Reimagining the Economy project explores local labor market, industrial, and development policies, combined with practitioner insights, to produce multidisciplinary scholarship to reshape narratives about how we achieve inclusive prosperity.

Explore all of the programs, projects, and initiatives at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy.

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