Stanford's new goal: Rethink poverty

from The San Jose Mercury News

CENTER HOPES TO SPARK A NATIONAL DISCUSSION
By Mike Swift
Mercury News

David Grusky thinks it's time for a revolution in how we think about poverty, just as Silicon Valley helped transform how society thinks about green issues.

Just as global warming is increasingly seen as an economic issue, not just a moral one, the director of Stanford University's new Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality says society needs to rethink poverty. Simply put: Society pays a high economic cost for poverty - just as it is expected to with global warming.

"There's no incentive in our current system for firms to take on the issue of poverty, just like there's no incentive for a firm not to pollute, but we all lose" from poverty, Grusky said.

Should a company be responsible for the social and economic costs of layoffs when those workers are forced to tap taxpayer-funded health care services, or suffer depression or commit crimes? Grusky asks.

Stanford's new multidisciplinary center is intended to be a response to the university's stated goal of solving real-world problems. The university's financial commitment to the center over time exceeds $1 million.

The university does not create a new interdisciplinary center "all that often," said Richard Saller, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. "We think it's critical to have the best scientific knowledge available for policy-makers, and to get it into the arena of public debate, and we think Stanford is really well positioned" to do that.

Grusky said the center hopes to have a national impact, serving as a clearinghouse that will bring poverty and inequality research to legislators, community organizers, journalists and others.

"We really do have the tools in science to deliver in the war on poverty in a way that before wasn't the case," he said. Advances in the social sciences, he added, allow researchers to collect better information on which anti-poverty policies work - and why.

The center's Web site, www.inequality.com, will join data and research from an array of government agencies and other sources. It will feature the work of about 400 scholars from Stanford and other universities around the world.

An academic network of that breadth - spanning the disciplines of sociology, history, philosophy, political science, law, business and education - "may be unique in Stanford," Saller said.

The center's high aspirations are also based on the realization, Grusky said, that Stanford "is somewhat behind the curve" in poverty and inequality research relative to similar efforts at Harvard, Princeton and the University of Wisconsin. Stanford recruited Grusky, a sociologist, from Cornell University in 2004.

The new inequality Web site, which will be in development over the next two months, will use dynamic software tools to allow people to graph data trends, and search for cause-and-effect relationships.

The center aims to play a role in the 2008 presidential election. It is talking with the Republican and Democratic candidates to put their platforms on poverty and inequality on record. The center will publish a magazine three times a year, starting in January.

"We're trying not just to represent scholars within the university," Grusky said, "but draw in people throughout the world."