Dr. Charlie Eaton is an economic sociologist and associate professor at the University of California, Merced.
Dr. Eaton investigates the power of elites in politics and the economy, as well as policy and organizational strategies to rebalance power and wealth towards ordinary people. His book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower (University of Chicago Press, 2022), is about the relationship between financialization, student debt, inequalities in higher education, and the rise of financiers among US billionaires. The book won the Pierre Bourdieu best book award from the American Sociological Association.
In his latest research, Dr. Eaton examines how billionaires from finance and from big tech adopted more oligarchical roles in US politics. The project experiments with machine learning methods for assembling data on billionaire social networks. Eaton writes about this research in his Substack newsletter, Axis of Oligarchy.
Dr. Eaton’s writing and research have been featured by the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Marketplace, CBS, CNN, and PBS. His academic research has been published in journals across the social sciences, including American Sociological Review, Review of Financial Studies, Social Forces, Socio-Economic Review, Sociology of Education, Politics & Society, P.S. Political Science and Politics, Research in Higher Education, Sociological Compass, and Socius.
Much of Dr. Eaton’s research uses data carpentry to digitize, link, and construct original data sets for measuring inequalities in the resources and activities of elites in relationship to less powerful social groups. Many of these data sets comprise organization-level or multi-level data for investment firms, portfolio companies, and universities. To support open and accessible sharing of this of code and data, Eaton and his collaborators in the Higher Education, Race, and the Economy (HERE) Lab, created the Higher Ed Data Hub.
Professor Eaton received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral scholar in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University before joining the faculty in sociology at UC Merced.
What is Axis of Oligarchy
This is my newsletter for trying to understand and explain how Wall Street and Big Tech gained so much wealth and power in America. My newsletter weaves together economic sociology, political economy, data visualization, open science methodology, and some explorations of self. I do my best thinking in the mountains, preferably while backcountry skiing.
What You Can Expect
I only plan to send you something when I think it’s worth sharing with you. I’m hoping this will be around once a month. We’ll see. I will try to confine what I write to areas where I really have expertise — economic sociology, financiers, elites, universities, open science methods, data visualization, and my own social experiences, including a dash of backcountry skiing.
I will probably combine multiple topics or pieces of news in a single newsletter so as to spare your in-box.
I’d Love to Hear from You
If you have reactions to anything I share, I’d love to hear back from you. I think you can just hit reply. Please also feel free to send me anything you write, read, or make that you think I’d be interested in. When it’s a great fit, I may include it in the news letter. Please also let me know if there’s anything you’d like to me to devote more attention to in the newsletter.
There’s no need to pay for this newsletter. I don’t plan to do paid content. But you’re welcome to chip in to support me, especially if Trump gets the University of California to eliminate my job.
If all this isn’t a match for you, and you need to unsubscribe, I totally get it. Either way, thanks for considering whether to join this experiment with me.
