CISSR Bi-Weekly Digest
January 9 - 22, 2024
Spotlight
Dr. Guido Alfani, Bocconi University and Professor Steven Durlauf discuss As Gods Among Men and the Changing Social Attitudes of the Ultra Rich
Recently, Professor Steven Durlauf interviewed Dr. Guido Alfani, a Professor from Bocconi University for the UChicago’s Stone Center on Inequality and Mobility’s Inequality Podcast.

The two scholars discussed the recently published book authored by Dr. Alfani titled As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West from Princeton University Press. In response to Prof. Durlauf’s question about why he chose to study the ultra-rich, Dr. Alfani answers by saying that there is a lack in the literature regarding the individual ways power and wealth affect society as a whole. Dr. Alfani states that although a very prominent theory about “wealth inequality” posits that inequality is a byproduct of increased economic growth but Dr. Alfani disagrees. He explains that the uber wealthy has always been in a ossified class within the societal structures from ancient Rome to the pre-industrial feudalism and onwards, long before the industrial revolution. In that respect, what determines the relations between the ultra wealthy and other classes and factors that determine inter-class transitivity is more the institutional and social structures which create these power dynamics rather than the extent and the pace of economic growth in a the immediate aftermath of WWII, and finds that this time experienced a rapid transfer of wealth through inheritances. These changes resulted in an increase of land selling, which helped spread the economic opportunities, while increasing the essentiality of the laborers who create and sustain this system. These increases in less hoarded wealth resulted in rising payrates and an increased need for labor, supporting and helping to close the wealth gap.
 
Dr. Alfani expresses that this transfer of wealth and enhanced social mobility has been complemented with the ultra rich shouldering the burden of war especially during WWI. However, according to Dr. Alfani, this proportional distribution of responsibility goes as far back as the Middle Ages when the nouveau riche used religion to justify their increased responsibility as more well-off members of society. The rejection of this responsibility to society even in times of crisis, is a very recent phenomenon for the rich, and points to a paradigm shift that warrants more attention and further research. To listen to Steven Durlauf’s interview with Dr. Alfani, click here. To read the interview in text format, click here.
Upcoming Events
January 9
Colloquium on Race, Education and Social Transformation


5pm, Kelly Hall, Room 108
Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation Colloquium


12:30pm, 1155 E. 60th Street, Room 101, Virtual
January 12

Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility


10:30 am, Social Science Research Building (SSRB), Tea Room
January 16

Divinity School and the Martin Marty Center


9am - 5pm, Swift Hall
The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts


12:30pm, Keller Center Room 0001
Department of Romance Languages and Literature


12:30pm, Classics Room 110
Center for Latin American Studies


12:30pm, Classics Room 110
January 22
Film Studies Center


7pm, Logan Center Screening Room
Around Town and Down the Road
January 9

The Council on Foreign Relations


9:45am, Virtual
January 10

Northwestern University


1:00pm, Virtual
Workshops and Forums

Tuesdays 3:30 - 4:50pm in Pick 506
January 11: In the Hegemon’s Shadow: How Security Amendments to a U.S. Government Grant Shape Firm Behavior (Pre-analysis Plan)” - Zikai Li and Alex Tippett *joint with Workshop on International Politics

January 18: Kate Baldwin, Yale University

Thursdays 12:30 - 1:50pm in NORC conference room, Room 232 at 1155 & Virtual

January 11: "How good are we at measuring global health? A case study of road traffic injury estimates" - Kavi Bhalla, University of Chicago

January 18: "Aggregating Inequalities: Analyzing the Regional Predictors of Child Maltreatment Investigation and Substantiation Density" - Tanya Rajan & Melanie Nadon

Mondays 12:30 - 2:00pm in Pick 105

January 22: “Re-inventing the Schoolmaster, teacher training in early 19th century London” - Ksenia Podvoiskaia, Department of History

Virtually on alternate Tuesdays from 5:00 to 6:20pm Central Time 

January 9: “Feminist Aspirations and ‘The Thing Everyone Seems to Worry About Being Mistaken for Doing: Theology'” - Hannah Jones, CSGS Dissertation Fellow, PhD Candidate, Divinity School

Various Wednesdays 4:30 - 6pm in Pick 105

January 11: "Whispers of Free Labor: A New Reading of the Bracero Program's Demise" - Nahomi Esquivel, specail joint seassion with Latin American History Workshop *special date/location: Pick 118

Various Wednesdays 4:30 - 6pm in Pick 105

January 10: "No estan solos, You Are Not Alone: Resisting U.S. Immigrant Detention from the Inside-Out" - Ramón Garibaldo Valdéz 

Typically on alternating Wednesdays 12:30-2 pm CST in Stuart 104
January 10: Plant-Human Hybrids in the Peruvian Amazon, Lorna Hadlock

Mondays 12 - 1:20pm in Pick 506

January 22:  “Materializing intersectional oppression: An exploitation-first theory of class, gender, and race” - Nicholas Vrousalis

Wednesdays 4:30 - 6pm in Pick 105

January 17: “Translating Nahua Textile Knowledge, Language and Femineity in the Early Hispanic World” - Andrea Reed Leal

Fridays from 10:30am until 12:00pm

January 19: Dalton Conley, Professor in Sociology, Princeton University

Thursdays 3:30 - 5pm in Pick Hall 506 & Zoom

January 11: In the Hegemon’s Shadow: How Security Amendments to a U.S. Government Grant Shape Firm Behavior (Pre-analysis Plan)” - Zikai Li and Alex Tippett *joint with Comparative Politics Workshop

January 18: “From the Bronze Age to Bismarck: Reconceptualizing Power as Adaptive Problem Solving and State Fitness in International Relations” - Meghan Iverson
Research Updates
Ilana Ventura and Asst. Prof. Angela García Survey Remittances and the COVID-19 Pandemic Effect on Economic Resiliency
Ilana Ventura, a PhD candidate in sociology and Angela García, an Assistant Professor of the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice & previous CISSR 20-21 Fellow explore the economic and socio-psychological migrant remittances from the U.S. during the pandemic. Remittances refers to the act of migrants sending money to their countries of origin for their family residing in the homeland. Within the scope of their paper, Ventura and García explain that especially for the smaller economies in the Global South, remittances can contribute more to the household economy than the domestically-earned active incomes of the family members, and for the some of the poorest states in the world, the remittances can sometimes accumulate to a larger portion of or even exceed the country’s GDP. Since many of these immigrant workers were employed within the service sector, and the service sector was among the hardest hit, the income consistency, security, and financial sustainability became topics of concern for the migrant workers. According to Ventura and García’s analysis, the remittance networks widened in the spirit of community and cooperation during the pandemic and the circulation schemes flexed to include not only direct family members but also acquaintances, and the social environment of these family members. Beyond these widened networks of circulation, remittances remained the same or even increased for migrant workers who were considered essential staff during the pandemic, such as nurses, direct supply chain workers like long distance transportation and medical cold chain employees, and employees whose jobs could also be performed remotely. For the food and short distance transportation industry, entertainment, hospitality, and some other sectors, the limiting effect of the pandemic was more pronounced and hence was the direct effect of the process to the money-making abilities of the workers in these industries. So, for workers in those industries, remittances slowed down, decreased in frequency, or periodically stopped during the pandemic. Still, as noted above, these decreases were sometimes compensated by the wider social networks and communal care that took place. Read the article published in the International Migration Review.

Asst. Prof. Ryan Jobson Writes About Melville Herskovitz, Anthropological Imagination & Trinidad in American Enthnologist
In his article "Facing the Flames: The Herskovitses, Trinidad, and the anthropological imagination", Assistant Professor of Anthropology & 23-24 CISSR Book Fellow, Ryan Cecil Jobson, looks at the work of anthropologist Melville Herskowirz in Africa during the early twentieth century. Twentieth century was a time during which social sciences had split more and more into sub-disciplines, flexed their scope, and these differences between disciplines became more prominent. During this time, Herskowitz studied Trinidad, a country with a colonial history, and looked carefully at the cultural practices and rituals of an island, Toco, within the country. Shortly before Herskowitz’s visit to the country, an oil production facility had caught fire and many people lost their jobs. Focusing on this critical moment, Jobson asks why Herskovitz excluded such a traumatic and tectonic experience from his analysis, and why he focused exclusively on the cultural peculiarities of the region. Asst. Prof. Jobson asks, employing a counterfactual thought experiment, how the dynamics of labor, economic disadvantage, colonialism, and production interact with cultural texture. In the end, Asst. Prof, Jobson proposes the discipline of anthropology move beyond relativist and culture-oriented analyses and plunge more deeply into the structural and experiential junctures of the human practices. Read the full article in American Ethnologist.
Assoc. Prof. Benjamin Lessing's research featured in The Guardian
UChicago Associate Professor of Political Science and a 2019-20 CISSR Fellow, Benjamin Lessing was prominently featured in The Guardian article titled "How a Brazilian prison gang became an international criminal leviathan," authored by Tom Phillips on November 11th 2023. In the article, Lessing delves into the evolution of the PCC (First Capital Command), tracing its origins from a prison "fraternity" in 1993 to its current status as a formidable billion-dollar cartel. Lessing's insights illuminate the Hobbesian dynamics of the prison environment in Sao Paulo and explain how the PCC emerged as a regional prison gang, initially formed to safeguard the rights of inmates, eventually evolving to protect their own criminal interests. He notes, "But for the average prisoner, they are content to be governed, just like the average citizen is content that there is a state." Initially confined to the Sao Paulo prison system, the PCC expanded its reach dramatically in 2001 by capturing thousands of guards and visitors during an uprising. A wave of attacks on police occurred in 2006, solidifying the gang's influence. The PCC's power has continued to burgeon as it established lucrative alliances with partners ranging from Bolivian cocaine producers to Italian mafiosi. Assoc. Prof. Lessing is an expert in the field of criminal conflict, focusing on organized violence perpetrated by armed groups that lack aspirations for formal state power. This expertise extends to various entities, including drug cartels, prison gangs, and paramilitaries. Read the full article including Lessing’s comments here.

ICYMI
The Seminary Co-op Bookstore Publishes the 2023 Notables of the Year

In December, The Seminary Co-Op released their notable books list for titles published in 2023 including many from faculty authors at the University of Chicago. The selection, which includes over fifty titles, features a rich and diverse selection that encompasses a wide variety of topics and disciplines. Among the highlighted titles from the selection, there is the freshly released book of our director Prof. Jenny Trinitapoli and the book released by previous fellow Asst. Prof. Sarah Newman. In An Epidemic of Uncertainty, Prof. Trinitapoli argues that Malawi’s AIDS epidemic and the possibility of having the HIV virus amplifies the uncertainty involved in reaching adulthood in Malawian youth. Prof. Trinitapoli argues that this uncertainty that affects roughly the half of all Malawian youth has effects that cannot be explained or remedied by exclusive medical or biological approaches. In Unmaking Waste: New Histories of Old Things Asst. Prof. Sarah Newman argues that “waste is neither universal nor self-evident” and claims instead that waste—what we deem “unwanted”—is a relatively recent idea. According to Newman, Western assumptions about waste begin with an imagined long, dirty stretch of “ancient past” broken up by a few expectations. Newman moves away from this sanitized narrative and heads to ancient Mesoamerica where the story of waste is far from linear. Using examples and archeological evidence from before and during colonization, Newman shows that people have thought about—and used—“trash” in many different ways. Read more about these books and other titles in the Bookstore’s 2023 selection.