Starting in the 2022-2023 academic year, Daniel Hirschman will be Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. He comes to Cornell after several years of teaching at Brown University and the University of Michigan where he graduated with a Ph.D. in Sociology. Dr. Hirschman’s work focuses on economic sociology, finance, organizations, as well as race and racism, and climate change.
Dr. Hirschman’s recent paper, “Rediscovering the 1%: Knowledge Infrastructures and the Stylized Facts of Inequality,” was published in one of sociology’s preeminent journals, the American Journal of Sociology. This paper examines why inequality researchers stopped looking at top earners in the mid-20th century, and why they started again in the 2000s. It shows how the data that these researchers used shaped the kinds of questions they asked, and made it possible for scholars in the 1980-1990s to miss the startling rise of the incomes of the top 1%. An abstract of this paper is included at the bottom of this article.
Benjamin Cornwell, Chair of the Department of Sociology, noted that: “Dan’s research is not only smart, it is also unique in that it sits at the intersection of areas in sociology that are rarely combined, such as the link between economic sociology and race. His expertise will greatly enrich the research and student experience in our Department.”
Abstract
In the 2000s, newly analyzed tax data revealed that top incomes in the United States—summarized as the 1%—had been rising dramatically upward since the early 1980s. Why did it take social scientists two decades to identify this trend and to incorporate it into debates about contemporary income inequality? Drawing on insights from the history and sociology of science, I argue that the social sciences rely on knowledge infrastructures to monitor trends and identify stylized facts. These infrastructures collect, process, and distribute data in ways that channel sustained attention to particular problems while rendering other potential observations out of focus. Like other infrastructures, they have significant inertia: initial design choices become locked in and shape the kinds of data readily available to future researchers. Thus economic knowledge infrastructures constructed in the mid-20th century, while identifying some forms of increasing income inequality, were incapable of tracking top incomes, which created the conditions for missing the rise of the 1%.
