It is a simple but persuasive idea: In a world of scarcity, rewards like jobs and pay should be distributed based on ability and effort, not birthright, connections, ways of living, wealth, and so on. Meritocracy, framed this way, may sound utterly uncontroversial. Yet the idea has its fair share of critics, who argue that “merit” tends to accrue to those lucky enough to have well-heeled, well-connected parents. In response to such criticisms, our guest today offers a just conception of meritocracy, having written some of the essential texts on the subject.

Thomas Mulligan is a visiting scholar at Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics and a researcher at the RAND Corporation. He is also the author of Justice and the Meritocratic State, a modern classic within the meritocracy literature. In this conversation with host Steven Durlauf, he discusses common critiques of meritocracy, how the idea relates to debates over affirmative action and reparations, and what policy solutions could make societies more meritocratic.

Beginning in the 1980s, a new political order led policymakers to prize economic efficiency, often at the expense of public goods. What has followed, our guest argues, has been a withdrawal of ethics from policy making, as well as an “erosion of kindness.” Our guest proposes a different ethos, one that hearkens back to a time before the pursuit of efficiency blinded us to other essential human values.

Philip Kitcher is the John Dewey Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including several that are integral to understanding contemporary inequality. In this conversation with host Steven Durlauf, he discusses the philosophical underpinnings of the market-driven worldview that has come to dominate policymaking, what that approach has wrought, and why charting a different path requires rethinking what education is for.

From Adam Smith’s pin factory to Henry Ford’s assembly line, specialization has long connoted a modern, efficient economy. Within this paradigm, workers’ jobs become repetitive but, ultimately, entail a narrow scope of tasks. So why, in today’s ultra-optimized economy, are so many supposedly specialized workers juggling so many wide and varied responsibilities?

Michelle Jackson is a sociologist at Stanford. In her latest book, The Division of Rationalized Labor, she chronicles how today’s workers became saddled with so many tasks. Her previous book, Manifesto for a Dream, made the scientific case for more radical policy interventions to address inequality. In this conversation with host Steven Durlauf, she discusses how scopes of work ballooned across the economy, how police officers became unlikely symbols of that change, and why reducing inequality may require rethinking the role of the family.

It is no secret that the power of American unions has waned since the middle of the 20th century. Their downturn has had far-reaching consequences: As the threat of organized labor recedes, employers may feel less pressure to offer concessions. Our guest today has done significant work studying the decline of the labor movement and its repercussions for workers, unionized or not. Few are better positioned to reflect on how we got here, how it has changed American society, and what lies ahead.

Tom VanHeuvelen is a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. His research examines the long-term causes and consequences of deunionization and other drivers of inequality. In this conversation with host Geoff Wodtke, he discusses the often-overlooked benefits of unions, the rise of “right-to-work” laws, and what the future of unionization may look like.

Inequality is often framed in terms of a binary: rich and poor, haves and have nots. But inequality between groups — based on gender, class, race, and so on — must be understood alongside inequalities within particular groups, at particular intersections of identity. Our guest today has contributed foundational work to this intellectual framework. She has also enriched our understanding of how Americans feel about their economic prospects in an era of high inequality.

Leslie McCall is a professor of sociology and political science at the CUNY Graduate Center and associate director of the Stone Center there. She is the author of Complex Inequality: Gender, Class, and Race in the New Economy, a landmark study of wage inequality, as well as her most recent book, The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs About Inequality, Opportunity, and Redistribution, which chronicles Americans’ shifting attitudes about the economy. In this conversation with host Steven Durlauf, she discusses her work examining inequality and Americans’ beliefs about it, as well as what her findings might tell us about meritocracy and the effects of artificial intelligence on the labor market.

To a large degree, the levels of inequality present in the United States intensified in the 1980s and 1990s. Starting in those decades, the poorest Americans began facing new threats, such as the “reforms” made to social welfare programs and the rise of mass incarceration. Our guest today has spent 30 years studying how politics and policy have shaped the lives of America’s poor, and his new book explores a lesser-known trend, one that persists today: the massive revenues the legal system extracts from the poor, a phenomenon he calls “legal plunder.”

Joe Soss is the Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service at the University of Minnesota. His most recent book (with sociologist Joshua Page) is Legal Plunder: The Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice. In this conversation with host Geoff Wodtke, Soss discusses the mechanisms through which the legal system strips resources from the poor, as well as how poverty governance became defined by “neoliberal paternalism,” which he chronicled in his first book, Disciplining the Poor.

We all belong to networks. Whether in the boardroom or the barroom, human beings use networks to try to achieve their goals. But not all networks are created equal, and so access to them (or the lack thereof) can drive inequality. At the same time, the networks with which we identify most — such as friends, family and colleagues — are often not the connections that prove most decisive. Rather, as our guest today has argued, it is weak ties that frequently leave the strongest influence on the course of our lives.

Mario Small is a sociologist at Columbia University. He is the author of Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life, and his work has explored how networks shape both mobility and inequality. In this conversation with host Steven Durlauf, Small discusses core insights from his 20-plus years studying urban inequality, advice for blending quantitative and qualitative methods, and the surprisingly potent networks that emerge around New York City daycare centers.

Among ancient civilizations, Rome inspires a special kind of fascination in the Western World. While the parallels between society now versus then are often overstated, we nevertheless can better understand ourselves by endeavoring to understand those who lived 2,000 years ago. Our guest’s work explores one facet of Roman life that reverberates in the way we live today: the surprisingly sophisticated financial affairs of average Romans.

Kim Bowes is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her latest book is Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent. The book draws on her own archeological work to chronicle Romans’ struggles with work, affordability, credit markets, and more. In this conversation with host Steven Durlauf, she discusses the ways consumerism defined plebeian life, the challenges of collecting data about the ancient world, and what the skeletons of Roman farmers can tell us about the economic lives they lived.

Across three seasons of The Inequality Podcast, thinkers from a range of disciplines have discussed how their work helps us understand inequality. Given the breadth and depth of the research featured, it is difficult to believe that the subject was once an afterthought in economics. For our 50th episode, we present a scholar whose groundbreaking ideas have proven integral to the study of inequality for over a half century, anticipating many current arguments and representing the foundations for others.

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate and a professor of economics at Columbia University. He is the author of many books, the most recent of which is The Origins of Inequality, and Policies to Contain It. In this conversation with host Steven Durlauf, he discusses his 60-year career studying the economics of inequality, including his influential studies of labor markets, his tenure working in the Clinton White House, and his thoughts on how AI might shape inequality.

As part of the current immigration crackdown, federal agents have turned to profiling, making stops on the basis of occupation or perceived ethnicity. In a system where confirming legal status can take days or weeks, agents are finding shortcuts in stereotypes. Aside from the dubious constitutionality of these stops, the assumptions behind these tactics raise questions: What makes someone look illegal? According to whom? And how do these perceptions emerge?

René Flores is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. His work investigates how social boundaries form around immigrants and racial minorities and how these divisions contribute to inequality. In this conversation with host Geoff Wodtke, Flores discusses the complicated views Americans express about immigrants in surveys, how those views affect immigrants and non-immigrants alike, and how a perception of “social illegality” can extend beyond actual documentation status.