📢 Join us for the next London Inequality Workshop! 🗓 Wed, 3 Dec 2025 | ⏰ 4–6pm 📍 KCL, Bush House (Room 2.02) Speakers: Jeanne Bomare, @valengabrielli (LSE) @MorelliSal (Roma Tre) Register 👉 https://t.co/eHTIBOLsuf #Inequality #EconTwitter

Have you picked up your copy of Inherited Inequality yet? You should! Congratulations to @christinajcross on this data-driven, accessible, and profoundly important account of why family structure does not explain the relative disadvantages of Black youth.

Today is a good day to remember that housing policy is also anti-poverty policy. ICYMI⤵️

I am delighted to share that Nobel laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee will join our Department of Economics @econ_uzh at the University of Zurich on July 1, 2026, as Lemann Foundation Professors of Economics. 🧵 1/7

FOUR new positions available at INET Oxford! @ZParolin is hiring: 🠺 1x FT Post-Doctoral Researcher in Inequality, Social Policy, and Social Mobility 🠺 3x PT Researchers in Inequality, Social Policy, and Social Mobility Find out more & apply ➵ https://t.co/NwiucmhXEq

3/3 -- For the part-time RA positions -- Great opportunity for PhD/DPhils or advanced masters students studying in the UK and/or from the UK to join our growing research team. See call for more specifics.

2/ Due to conditions of the grant used to hire, candidates should have eligibility to work in the UK (we'll hire without this condition in the future). Desired start date: Jan 2026 or as soon as possible afterward. Great post-doc opp for those currently in need of funding.

Join us at @INETOxford! I'm hiring one post-doctoral researcher and three research assistants in the field of inequality, social policy, and social mobility to join our research team. Deadline: October 24. Read more and apply:

I'm truly honored to receive the 2025 Kershaw Award. I entered the policy research world almost by accident after a failed run in the Australian Baseball League. Any recognition of my work is a testament to the wonderful mentors & colleagues I've learned from these past 10 years.

New WP: We study how minimum wage increases affect poverty and food hardship in the U.S from 1981-2019. Different from recent work, we study the Supplemental Poverty Measure + two measures of food hardship, factor in cost-of-living differences, and more. https://t.co/Qexd1GRsxh

Welcome to DSPI, Professor @ZParolin! 👋 Prof Parolin joins us in October as Professor of Social Policy, Inequality & Opportunity. He will also hold posts at @INETOxford and @NuffieldCollege - find out more: https://t.co/l2u1MFExLc #SocialMobility #Inequality #Poverty

My response with Raj to Heckman and Eshaghnia in the WSJ: https://t.co/CX1cLzExa6

10/ Tl;dr: clarifying which of the three criteria one desires from a cash transfer expansion would probably clarify the competing perspectives on BFY here. Open to pushback from others who have written on this (@KelseyTuoc @Noahpinion @MattBruenig @mattyglesias @nytdavidbrooks..)

9/ In short: cash can clearly reduce poverty and promote families’ consumption power. To many, that’s enough. To others, it’s not; cash should do more. All fair. But claims like ‘BFY shows that cash xfers don’t do much to reduce poverty’ (first line of Brooks) are unwarranted.

8/ But beyond that: complaints that transfers do not affect pre-tax/transfer poverty are massively over-oriented in perspective #3 above (past xfers should lead to full employment and no in-work poverty today?), and should instead shift attention to US labor market institutions.

7/ Finally, a majorly-misleading claim that Brooks repeats: stable pre-tax/transfer poverty rates suggest that increased spending on the welfare state is unhelpful. @BobGreensteinDC has addressed this mischaracterization, so I’ll avoid repeating.

6/ On larger body of lit: the RCTs suggest we should be more skeptical about downstream/longer-run gains from cash. Still, they should be understood as part of a broader set of studies that often find favorable second-order and long-run benefits from childhood cash support.

5/ On context: Unfortunately, the RCT was conducted largely amidst COVID-19, inflation, and 2020/2021 CTC + StimChecks. The treatment intensity ($333/mo) remained constant in nominal terms, but the boost to relative income differences vs. control cases diminished dramatically.

4/ What BFY does offer is evidence that unconditional cash support may not achieve objectives #2 and #3. Disappointing, but that (a) does not invalidate the usefulness of cash for #1 and (b) ought to be understood in context and relative to a larger body of research on the topic.

3) That cash achieves #1 is not controversial. But BFY finds many null effects for #2 and #3. Brooks (and others) use the lack of downsteam and durable effects to make claims like “giving people money doesn’t do much to lift them out of poverty,” which is not what BFY finds.