Those three are heavy hitters in the research on wealth inequality; other top scholars are also from Europe. There’s the British economist Anthony Atkinson at the London School of Economics, who has co-authored papers with Piketty and Saez; Nicholas Bloom, a British economist who writes about inequality at Stanford; Thomas Phillipon, a French economist at New York University who studies the financial industry and outsized compensation; Branko Milanovic, a Serbian economist at the City University of New York who published a book on the causes of inequality; and Stefanie Stantcheva, a French economist at Harvard who has co-authored papers on the top 1 percent and the effects of taxation with Saez and Piety. [...]
One reason is the deep influence of the so-called Chicago school. The economics department at the University of Chicago has long been a leader in the field; it has garnered the most Nobel Prizes of any university economics department and a significant number of John Bates Clark medals in economics. But inequality has never been a priority for the Chicago school, to say the least. It has a strong libertarian bent, focusing on how to promote competition and economic growth and the benefits of a free market. “In general, the [American] economics profession has avoided the subject of class conflict. All issues of distribution have been regarded as less pertinent than ideas of growth,” Arthur Goldhammer, a senior affiliate at Harvard’s Center for European Studies who studies French and American politics and history, told me. “Distributive questions in economics just raise hostility, and ultimately, growth is the important issue.” [...]
Why is class conflict more taboo in the United States, a nation dreamed up with at least a bit of rhetoric about throwing off the rigid class structure of Europe? Michael Zweig, an emeritus professor at SUNY Stony Brook, says that American economists haven’t always shied away from social problems like class and inequality. But during the second half of the 20th century, he says, class was “driven from the discipline,” Zweig says. This is largely because U.S. economists focused on the market, always the market.
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