MIT Department of Economics to launch James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work | MIT News

Starting in July, MIT’s Shaping the Future of Work Initiative in the Department of Economics will usher in a significant new era of research, policy, and education of the next generation of scholars, made possible by a gift from the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation. In recognition of the gift and the expansion of priorities it supports, on July 1 the initiative will become part of the new James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work. This center will be officially launched at a public event in fall 2025.

The Stone Center will be led by Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor, and co-directors David Autor, the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor in Economics, and Simon Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship. It will join a global network of 11 other wealth inequality centers funded by the Stone Foundation as part of an effort to advance research on the causes and consequences of the growing accumulation at the top of the wealth distribution.

“This generous gift from the Stone Foundation advances our pioneering economics research on inequality, technology, and the future of the workforce. This work will create a pipeline of scholars in this critical area of study, and it will help to inform the public and policymakers,” says Provost Cynthia Barnhart.

Originally established as part of MIT Blueprint Labs with a foundational gift from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Shaping the Future of Work Initiative is a nonpartisan research organization that applies economics research to identify innovative ways to move the labor market onto a more equitable trajectory, with a central focus on revitalizing labor market opportunities for workers without a college education. Building on frontier micro- and macro-economics, economic sociology, political economy, and other disciplines, the initiative seeks to answer key questions about the decline in labor market opportunities for non-college workers in recent decades. These labor market changes have been a major driver of growing wealth inequality, a phenomenon that has, in turn, broadly reshaped our economy, democracy, and society.

Support from the Stone Foundation will allow the new Stone Center to build on the Shaping the Future of Work Initiative’s ongoing research agenda and extend its focus to include a growing emphasis on the interplay between technologies and inequality, as well as the technology sector’s role in defining future inequality.

Core objectives of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work will include fostering connections between scholars doing pathbreaking research on automation, AI, the intersection of work and technology, and wealth inequality across disciplines, including within the Department of Economics, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing; strengthening the pipeline of emerging scholars focused on these issues; and using research to inform and engage a wider audience including the public, undergraduate and graduate students, and policymakers.     

The Stone Foundation’s support will allow the center to strengthen and expand its commitments to produce new research, convene additional events to share research findings, promote connection and collaboration between scholars working on related topics, provide new resources for the center’s research affiliates, and expand public outreach to raise awareness of this important emerging challenge. “Cathy and I are thrilled to welcome MIT to the growing family of Stone Centers dedicated to studying the urgent challenges of accelerating wealth inequality,” James M. Stone says.

Agustín Rayo, dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, says, “I am thrilled to celebrate the creation of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center in the MIT economics department. Not only will it enhance the cutting-edge work of MIT’s social scientists, but it will support cross-disciplinary interactions that will enable new insights and solutions to complex social challenges.”

Jonathan Gruber, chair of the Department of Economics, adds, “I couldn’t be more excited about the Stone Foundation’s support for the Shaping the Future of Work Initiative. The initiative’s leaders have been far ahead of the curve in anticipating the rapid changes that technological forces are bringing to the labor market, and their influential studies have helped us understand the potential effects of AI and other technologies on U.S. workers. The generosity of the Stone Foundation will allow them to continue this incredible work, while expanding their priorities to include other critical issues around inequality. This is a great moment for the paradigm-shifting research that Acemoglu, Autor, and Johnson are leading here at MIT.”

“We are grateful to the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation for their generous support enabling us to study two defining challenges of our age: inequality and the future of work,” says Acemoglu, who was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2024 (with co-laureates Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson). “We hope to go beyond exploring the causes of inequality and the determinants of the availability of good jobs in the present and in the future, but also develop ideas about how society can shape both the work of the future and inequality by its choices of institutions and technological trajectories.”

“We are incredibly fortunate to be joining the family of Stone Centers around the world. Jim and Cathleen Stone are far-sighted and generous donors, and we are delighted that they are willing to back us and MIT in this way,” says Johnson. “We look forward to working with all our colleagues, at MIT and around the world, to advance understanding and practical approaches to inequality and the future of work.”

Autor adds, “This support will enable us — and many others — to focus our scholarship, teaching and public outreach towards shaping a labor market that offers opportunity, mobility, and economic security to a far broader set of people.” 

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