# Steven Durlauf
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Steven Neil Durlauf (born August 12, 1958) is an American social scientist and economist. He is currently Steans Professor of Educational Policy at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. Durlauf was previously the William F. Vilas Research Professor and Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Leslie McCall on Intersectional Inequality, AI, and Meritocracy
Inequality is often framed in terms of a binary: rich and poor, haves and have nots. But inequality between groups — based on gender, class, race, and so on — must be understood alongside inequalities within particular groups, at particular intersections of identity. Our guest today has contributed…
How meritocracy can help solve—or exacerbate—our inequality problem
It’s a widely held belief in our society, even among groups that disagree with each other on other issues, that meritocracy is a public good. Broadly, meritocracy speaks to our innate sense of fairness—people should get what they deserve. But what exactly constitutes merit? In the dictionary, it’s …
Michelle Jackson on the Overworked Labor Force
From Adam Smith’s pin factory to Henry Ford’s assembly line, specialization has long connoted a modern, efficient economy. Within this paradigm, workers’ jobs become repetitive but, ultimately, entail a narrow scope of tasks. So why, in today’s ultra-optimized economy, are so many supposedly specia…
Philip Kitcher on the Erosion of Ethics in Policymaking
Beginning in the 1980s, a new political order led policymakers to prize economic efficiency, often at the expense of public goods. What has followed, our guest argues, has been a withdrawal of ethics from policy making, as well as an “erosion of kindness.” Our guest proposes a different ethos, one …
Thomas Mulligan on Acting Meritocratically
It is a simple but persuasive idea: In a world of scarcity, rewards like jobs and pay should be distributed based on ability and effort, not birthright, connections, ways of living, wealth, and so on. Meritocracy, framed this way, may sound utterly uncontroversial. Yet the idea has its fair share o…
Jahel Queralt on the Costs of Moralizing Success and Failure
Critics of meritocracy often emphasize the ways merit-based thinking can justify grossly unequal outcomes, such as wide gaps in pay between rank-and-file workers and CEOs. Indeed, to some meritocratic thinkers, a sought-after executive receiving an eight-figure salary is simply a skilled worker get…
Lane Kenworthy on What Matters More Than Inequality Reduction
Over the past two decades, addressing income and wealth inequality has become a bigger and bigger priority for policymakers and researchers across the world. But have advocates focused on it too much? Our guest today argues that societies should de-emphasize inequality reduction and instead pursue …
Beatrice Cherrier on the Evolution of Economic Thought
It is easy to regard economic ideas as something akin to laws of nature. In reality, every economic idea has a human history, a process through which it was devised, debated, and refined by economists — a group as subject to human nature as any other. Our guest today has spent a career studying how…
Daniel Markovits on ‘The Meritocracy Trap’ (Live)
Meritocracy was meant to dislodge the old aristocratic elite: In its most idealized version, a society’s richest would earn their riches, as opposed to merely inheriting them. But what happens when these new meritocratic elites begin using their wealth to give their children unfair advantages? If m…
Zachary Bleemer on the Stratification of American Higher Education
In the United States, the most well-resourced universities largely admit the highest-scoring students, while the least-resourced serve students with the lowest scores. But if individual achievement is shaped not only by ability, but also by family resources, school quality, parental education, and …
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