IAS Distinguished Lecture Series: “Market Failure and the Spectacular Rise in Inequality” by Prof. David Grusky

It was our honor to have Professor David Grusky given a public lecture on “Market Failure and the Spectacular Rise in Inequality” in our forth lecture of the IAS Distinguished Lecture Series on Inequality and Poverty held on 17 February 2011 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Prof. Grusky is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, Director of the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, coeditor of Pathways Magazine, and coeditor of the Stanford University Press Social Inequality Series. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, recipient of the 2004 Max Weber Award, founder of the Cornell University Center for the Study of Inequality, and a former Presidential Young Investigator.

The abstract of Prof. Grusky’s lecture is as follows:

We typically understand inequality as a by-product of a smoothly functioning labor market in which the rise of skill-demanding technologies increases the demand for skilled labor and bids up the price for skilled labor. This account, which stresses simple supply and demand forces, has inequality playing the role of message-deliverer to labor, the message being to “get skill.” The core purpose of the speaker's research is to build an alternative model that estimates how market failure in the form of rent-seeking explains much of the takeoff in inequality.

In Prof. Grusky’s lecture, the concept of rent was introduced to explain the occurrence of inequality. Rent is, by definition, the wage in excess of counterfactual wage under perfect market competition. According to Prof. Grusky, the inequality undergoing currently in U.S., is in fact a consequence of the asymmetric trend in rent. On the one hand, there is much rent creation at the top of class structure. On the other, rent at the bottom of class structure is diminishing. These two processes have led to the failure of a well-functioning market.

With the market failure in U.S., Prof. Grusky made policy advice at the end of the lecture that U.S. should build a better and less corrupt market for the purpose of addressing the problem of inequality. Hong Kong and U.S. share similarities on both GDP per capita figure and Gini coefficient which are prevailing indicators of inequality level. We are here again to thank Prof. Grusky for him sharing the U.S.’s experience for our valuable reference.

If you are interested in the details of the lecture, please view the following link for the lecture video:

http://videochannel.ust.hk/Watch.aspx?Section=Channels&Channel=2&SubType=All&View=Icon&Sort=Date&Page=1&Current=1

我們很榮幸邀請到Prof. David Grusky蒞臨香港科技大學為我們主講第四次不平等和貧窮系列的IAS傑出學人講座，講題為「市場失效及社會不平等的攀升」。Prof. Grusk是美國史丹福大學社會學系的教授、貧窮及不平等研究中心的主任、Pathways Magazine及史丹福大學出版社 - 社會不平等系列的合編者、American Association for the Advancement of Science的研究員、2004 Max Weber Award的得獎者、康乃爾大學不平等研究中心的創辦者等。

Prof. Grusky演講之內容摘要，請參閱上述所提供的英文版本。