America Works: Thoughts on an Exceptional U.S. Labor Market

FOREWORD

FOREWORD On April 19, 2007, the Russell Sage Foundation will celebrate its centennial, 100 years to the day since Margaret Olivia Sage dedicated the foundation, in her husband’s name, “to the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States of America .” From the outset, social research played a key role in the foundation ’s mission—both by providing vivid descriptions of the social problems that called out for reform in a newly industrialized, urbanized America and by assessing the effectiveness of the foundation ’s early programs designed to improve the lot of the disadvantaged . As the foundation’s enterprise matured after World War II, the Russell Sage trustees realized that to better serve the emerging mass society social science would require significant development —in its analytic tools, its sources of data, and its theoretical capacities . Accordingly, the trustees decided that a foundation the size of RSF could contribute to the general social welfare most effectively by investing directly in the development and application of social science. This has been the foundation’s unique objective ever since. Over the past sixty years, the foundation has sought to shape and strengthen the social sciences in a wide variety of ways. It has invested in new disciplines, among them the sociology of medicine and law, and a new brand of economics based less on presumed rationality and more on evidence about how economic decisions are actually made. It has pushed to create new sources of social data, such as the General Social Survey, and to improve the analysis of existing data sources, principally by means of its long-standing analysis of social trends revealed by the U.S. Census. Russell Sage has also worked to support and disseminate promising new methodologies, such as statistical techniques for synthesizing mulxi tiple research studies of a given social policy or program to achieve more reliable generalizations about what works. The foundation’s recent activities have sustained its traditional aims of bringing social science more effectively to bear on describing social problems and analyzing the causes and consequences of social change. RSF has developed research programs on the social consequences of changing gender roles in the wake of the civil rights movement, on the vexing persistence of poverty and the rise of economic inequality in the United States over the past three decades, on the declining fortunes of minority workers in the innercity economies of the 1980s and early 1990s, and on the tectonic shifts in the U.S. labor market since the early 1980s that have put workers with limited education and bargaining power at such a distinct and growing disadvantage. Russell Sage has also devoted substantial attention to understanding the social consequences of recent demographic change. The foundation’s fifteen-year program of research on the continuing wave of immigration to the United States provides a rich source of information about the impact the new immigrants are having on the country and the problems that immigrants and their children face as they try to make their way in American society. A related research program has addressed the changes in American life brought on by the increased diversity of the U.S. population—from the growing complexity of relations between racial and ethnic groups to the problems that American institutions encounter as they attempt to accommodate a more diverse citizenry. The Russell Sage Foundation’s hundredth birthday offers a unique moment to pause and take stock of this work, even as the enterprise continues. The three volumes commissioned for the centennial illustrate and reflect upon the use of social science to deepen our understanding of American life. They do not recapitulate the work of the foundation. They seek instead to push the work ahead. Over its long history, Russell Sage has struggled repeatedly to understand the social costs of the rough and tumble American labor market, the systemic roots of persistently high levels of inequality in the United States, and the political difficulties of establishing an effective role for social research in the formation of social policy. Foreword xii The three centennial volumes take up these themes with innovative and provocative arguments that demonstrate again the power of social research to move debate beyond conventional wisdom, to give society fresh ways to see itself, and to recommend new strategies for improving national life. No doubt these arguments will provide rich grounds for debate. But since social science is...