Save the Date: May 12, 2016

Please join us for the annual Daniel Patrick Moynihan Lecture on Social Science and Public Policy. The event will be held on Capitol Hill this year, with more details to come.

 

Early next year, we will announce the winners of the 2016 Prize and our incoming cohort of AAPSS Fellows.

Academy Holds Senate Briefing on 
Social Mobility 

On October 16, 2015, The Academy held a congressional briefing and moderated Q&A session on social mobility in the twenty-first century.


The event focused on the January 2015 volume of The ANNALS. David Grusky of Stanford,Timothy Smeeding of the University of Wisconsin, and Robert Hauser of The National Academies (and AAPSS Board member) were the panelists. Drs. Grusky and Smeeding were coeditors of the volume, along with C. Matthew Snipp, also of Stanford.


The briefing focused on what we know about mobility, how mobility is measured, and whether current national data sources are sufficient to address questions about mobility that are critical to public policy (they are not).


The panelists introduced the American Opportunity Study as a proposed solution to data insufficiency, detailing a strategy to build stronger evidence that can inform policies aimed at combatting long-term poverty. The briefing was well attended by Senate office staff, committee staff, and agency employees. Senators Jim Moran (R-KS) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH), co-chairs of the Senate Economic Mobility Caucus, sponsored the event.  

February 12, 2016: D.C. Policy Seminar on Family Change and Opportunity

AAPSS will host a Capitol Hill policy seminar titled, "Family Change, Child Wellbeing, and the American Working Class" in February 2016. The panelists will include AAPSS Fellows Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins; Sara McLanahan of Princeton; and Robert Putnam of Harvard. 

 

The seminar aims to explain the tremendous changes that have occurred in recent decades to the structure and dynamics of American families, and the extent to which those changes relate to stability in the middle and lower classes and opportunities for children. The panel will be moderated by Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and now a columnist for the Washington Post. Please check the AAPSS website for event updates.

Upcoming in The ANNALS

In the January volume of The ANNALS, "Living in a High-Inequality Regime," special editors Alair MacLean and David B. Grusky present scholarship on the "social fallout" of income inequality. As the editors say in their introduction there is much research on the "sources and causes" of the growing income gap, but less is known about how people are living the everyday within this "high-inequality regime." How has economic inequality affected family life, criminal justice, and education in the United States? How has it changed our attitudes about ourselves and others? How has it shaped the American people's politics? This volume addresses these questions and more.

 

The March and May 2016 volumes of  The ANNALS will return to issues in criminal justice. The March volume is dedicated to the court-mandated reduction of the prison population in California, which is one of the greatest social experiments ongoing in America. In May, we will present research about how the criminal justice system affects family life. More about these volumes is to come, as the publication dates approach.

 

 

The American Academy of Political and Social Science
202 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-3806
215.746.6500 www.aapss.org 
Volume 16, December 2015
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