INEQUALITY 101. ARTICLE FIVE AUTHORS THAT CHANGED THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT INEQUALITY

Inequality 101 is a series of short articles written and curated by the Graduate Inequality Review aiming to provide an introduction to the foundations of inequality research and policy.
 
Many authors have thought, written and taught about inequality of all kinds over time, and this collective effort is the reason inequality research is such a vast field today. However, there are some scholars whose contributions have fundamentally altered our understanding of certain aspects of inequality- be it on the basis of income, gender, race, or international political economy. Read on for an introduction to the ideas of five authors that changed the way we think about inequality.
 
Claudia Goldin. Awarded with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2023, Claudia Goldin (1946) is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Much of her work has focused on gender inequality and the labour market. In 1994, she published an article called The U-Shaped Female Labor Force Function in Economic Development and Economic History, providing evidence that the labour force participation rate of married women first declines and then rises as countries develop due to changing household-level economic incentives. Her 2002 article, co-authored with Lawrence F. Katz, The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women's Career and Marriage Decisions showed that the greater availability of the contraceptive pill in the late 1960s allowed women more autonomy over their own professional and reproductive choices.
 
Branko Milanovic. Born in Serbia but later naturalised as American, Branko Milanovic (1953) is a research professor at the City University of New York. The author of several books on income distribution and inequality, such as Worlds Apart (2005) and The Haves and Have-Nots (2011), he is best known for his “elephant-shaped curve”. The graph, showing the evolution in income for the entire world population, first appeared in his 2013 article Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession, co-written with Christoph Lakner. It shows that those in the 70th-90th percentile, mostly low- and middle-income people in the Global North, were the only ones who saw no increase in their real income over the twenty year period between 1988 and 2008.
 
Kimberlé Crenshaw. The only non-economist in this list, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1959) is an American civil rights advocate and a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School. Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in her 1989 essay Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. With this word, Crenshaw was expressing the idea that the American legal system treats discrimination along a single identity axis, such as gender or race. Therefore, it is badly-equipped to provide justice to Black women, who face specific discrimination that cannot be reduced to being discriminated only as Black or only as women. Since Crenshaw first wrote about intersectionality, it has gained wide popularity within different fields of inequality research.
 
Daron Acemoglu. Daron Acemoglu (1967) is a Turkish-born American economist and Professor at MIT who specialises in political economy. Much of his work has been developed and published with Simon Jonhson and James Robinson: in 2010, they published the article The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development, arguing that the character of the institutions set up in different colonised countries during colonial times explains many of their economic outcomes today. Acemoglu and Robinson synthesised all their research on institutional determinants of economic performance in their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, which explores the drivers of democratic regimes and how democracy promotes economic growth.
 
Thomas Piketty. A professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Thomas Piketty (1971) is a French economist whose work focuses on income and wealth inequality. Together with Emmanuel Saez, they pioneered the use of administrative and fiscal data for in-depth studies on income inequalities, which has the key advantage of not relying on self-reported income figures through surveys. In 2014, he published the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, focusing on wealth and income inequality in Europe and the US since the 18th century. His main argument is that, when the rate of return to capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g), wealth accumulation and inequality is unavoidable unless compensated with state intervention and, particularly, extensive wealth taxation.