Welcome

I study the power of elites in politics and the economy, as well as policy and organizational challenges to their concentrated power and wealth.

This website pulls together my newsletter, latest research, data science resources, and information about my lab.

My book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower (University of Chicago Press, 2022), is about the relationship between financialization, inequalities in higher education, and the rise of private equity and hedge fund investors among US billionaires. The book won the Pierre Bourdieu best book award from the American Sociological Association.

My ongoing research examines how billionaires from finance and from big tech adopted more oligarchical roles in US politics.

My writing and research has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, TIME, Newsweek, and elsewhere.

My academic work has been published in American Sociological Review, Review of Financial Studies, Social Forces, Socio-Economic Review, Sociology of Education, Politics & Society, Research in Higher Education, Sociological Compass, and Socius.

My research uses data carpentry to digitize, link, and construct original data for measuring inequalities in the resources and activities of elites and less powerful social groups. With my collaborators at the HERE Lab, I publish code and data from this work at the Higher Ed Data Hub.

My newsletter weaves together economic sociology, political economy, data visualization, open science methodology, and my explorations of self. I do most of my thinking in the mountains, preferably while backcountry skiing.