The Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics (CID) is an open and multidisciplinary research center, bringing together students and faculty from a variety of fields, including sociology, economics, public policy, social work, philosophy, education, and others. It pursues cutting-edge research and innovative teaching on one of the central societal challenges of our time: social inequality. With a focus on the dynamics of social inequality, CID’s scientific mission is to develop a better understanding of changes and stability in social inequality across time, generations, and sociopolitical contexts. The center also helps expand the social scientific data infrastructure available to support research on these topics and increases the accessibility of high-quality data for inequality researchers everywhere.

"Cap Personal Wealth at One Billion"

Today, the International Day of the Worker, wealth inequality in the United States is higher than in any other rich country in the world.

On the one side, immense amounts of wealth, such as the wealth of Elon Musk, are concentrated at the top, on the other side, one in ten U.S. households have no wealth and are actually in debt. CID Faculty Director Fabian Pfeffer and Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Creative Practice at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning Kathy Velikov explore this imbalance in a video—and suggest an approach to help level the wealth playing field.

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Announcing our 2023-2024 CID Emerging Inequality Scholar Awardees

We’re pleased to announce our CID Emerging Inequality Scholars for the 2023-2024 academic year. Congratulations to Neil Christy, a doctoral student in Economics, and Jasmine Simington, a joint doctoral student in the departments of Sociology and Public Policy.

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CID is hiring!

CID is now accepting applications for a Research Fellow (RF) with knowledge and experience with advanced computational and statistical methods. The RF will be a central contributor to the new project Measuring Racial Inequality in Tax Data, whose Principal Investigator is Dr. Pablo Mitnik. The salary range is $63,000-72,000, and the RF will be granted time to pursue their own scholarly projects and will have an annual research budget. Applications accepted on a rolling basis.

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What Does U.S. Wealth Inequality Look Like?

Most social scientists tend to measure wealth inequality by studying wealth concentration at the very top, or by describing the distribution of wealth across the rest of the population. It can be difficult to consider and view both aspects of wealth inequality at the same time. To help see and understand the full spectrum of wealth inequality, CID Director Fabian Pfeffer and CID Graduate Student Fellow Asher Dvir-Djerassi, created an interactive visualization of the U.S. wealth distribution.

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Have you visited CID?

What makes the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics (CID) different from many spaces on the U-M Campus? The space was designed and built in collaboration with faculty from Taubman College of Architecture as a pedagogical and spatial prototype for a new, flexible training model. Student fellows and affiliates from the center were involved in the creation of the space every step of the way. Students asked for standing desks, storage space, a private writing room, and more.

Explore the space

Inequality Scholar Spotlight: Davon Norris

How do we as a society decide what is valuable or worthwhile? Economic sociologist Davon Norris, Ph.D., is working to understand how society’s tools for determining what is of value and worthwhile are steeped in patterns of inequality, especially racial inequality.

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