Shay O’Brien

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Join the @umichstonecid.bsky.social for @shayobrien.bsky.social - Kinship Interlocks: How the Intimate Exchange of Wealth, Status, and Power Generates Upper-Class Persistence
Tuesday, March 10, 10:30am-12:00pm EDT
RSVP to save your seat: myumi.ch/A15MJ
1430BD ISR-Thompson

Epstein case: 'The beauty of young women operates as a marker of status' OP-ED. American sociologist Ashley Mears, a former model, explains in an op-ed that the normalized presence of women alongside wealthy men provides them with 'a form of capital that wealthy men can mo...

“An abundance of girls functions as a form of capital that wealthy men can mobilize to build ties among themselves…
In [this system], men endowed w/ wealth extract value from young women's *bodies* w/ a disturbing degree of impunity, permitted through the value system of our society.”🧪
Ashley Mears!

💸🚨I am hiring 2 Postdocs for my ERC-funded project SOCDEBT on #debt dynamics across countries. One position: #SocialStratification + strong quantitative skills. The other: qualitative research and #EconomicSociology. waitkus.github.io/SOCDEBT/ 🚨💸

The billionaires' eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science Edge - Jeffrey Epstein's favourite intellectual salon - was sold to me as a gathering of the world's finest minds, writes Virginia Heffernan. The files reveal it was something far darker: a decades-lo...

“Billionaires really like thinkers who see their exploitation of the weak as a good and natural thing.”

While most people prefer equal inheritance, wealthy individuals are more willing to support unequal transfers when they help preserve wealth across generations ➡️ based on new experimental evidence now published with @natrinh.bsky.social and @dariatisch.bsky.social in @sfjournal.bsky.social

The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering

The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory

Tracking ICE's Profits ICE is extraordinarily costly to working people & grotesquely profitable for the worst among us

ICYMI @hebagowayed.bsky.social wrote about the companies profiting from ICE’s ethnic cleansing campaign and why a bipartisan consensus keeps the out-of-control agency funded for our newsletter Group Threat (please subscribe).

Join us on 1/27 for a symposium on "Why Wealth Inequality Matters," with panel discussions including:

➡️ The Political Philosophy of Wealth Inequality
➡️ Wealth Inequality in the US
➡️ Authoritarianism & Wealth Inequality

See the agenda & register: shapingwork.mit.edu/events/why-w...

"Captain Gains" on Capitol Hill Shang-Jin Wei & Yifan Zhou WORKING PAPER 34524 DOI 10.3386/w34524 ISSUE DATE November 2025 Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. Leaders' superior performance arises through two mechanisms. The political influence channel is reflected in higher returns when their party controls the chamber, sales of stocks preceding regulatory actions, and purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms.

令 1 1 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 Year Figure 2: Estimated dynamic quasi-difference-in-differences coefficient, di, of equation(3), with vertical dashed lines representing 90 percent confidence intervals. The point estimate of the year in which the lawmaker became a congressional leader (Year 0) is normalized to zero. BHAR over the 250 days following each trade is the dependent variable and calculated using the Fama-French five-factor plus momentum as the benchmark model.

After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts

www.nber.org/papers/w34524

via @florianederer.bsky.social

New York millionaires: threatening to flee the city since 2009

Fossil fuel billionaires are bankrolling the anti-trans movement An investigation shared exclusively with Atmos and HEATED finds that 80% of anti-trans organizations receive fossil fuel funding.

Excellent reporting from Heated and Atmos.

It looks like some of the biggest investors in the anti-trans movement are fossil fuel billionaires who are trying to use trans issues to ensure that Republicans pass policies favorable to their industry.

heated.world/p/fossil-fue...

Mislabeled TFR chart

This piece in WaPo by @zhoyoyo.bsky.social, "The two reasons Americans aren’t having babies, according to data," has an unusual amount of wrong things, starting with the incorrectly labeled figure at the very top
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/int...

‘It’s a complicated time to be a white Southerner’ − and their views on race reflect that How do white Southerners think about their racial status in a world that is scrutinizing white advantages? Researchers found people across the political spectrum grappling with what being white means.

For The Conversation, I wrote about how White Southerners are making sense of what it means to be White in these times.

In a nutshell, it’s complicated.

I hope you’ll read and share widely.

theconversation.com/its-a-compli...

The thing about charging him with assault for throwing a sandwich is that it exposes the historic lie of “assaulting an officer.”

Thank you so much, Regina!! And likewise - I am SO excited about yall’s project 🤩

Applications Are Open for Two Postdoctoral Positions at the GC CUNY Stone Center - Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality The Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality is seeking applicants for an eighth cohort of postdoctoral scholars. These full-time, two-year positions will begin in August 2026.

We invite applications for two postdoctoral scholars! These 2-year positions start in Aug. 2026 and are based at the GC CUNY Stone Center in NYC. One is focused on #mobility and #poverty, the other on #wealth and/or wealth inequality. Apply by Nov. 3!
#EconSky #Sociology #PoliSciSky
bit.ly/40TZR6J

This Tuckahoe home won a $1.26 billion contract for an ICE detention center. The owner isn't talking. The company’s website is dated and largely accessible only via login.

how much of the money from the ICE/tax cuts bill is just going to go to scammers, do you think? www.richmonder.org/this-tuckaho...

We must see that our lives, our struggles and successes, are bound up in each other. What does collective action look like if you stop being optimistic your discipline's market will improve and instead think about academia as a whole?

“Politics Is Conflictual” “Massive changes often unfold on large time scales,” philosopher Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò told The Drift in 2022.

All of this is deeply right and sensible.

www.thedriftmag.com/politics-is-...

Opinion | The Elite Panic at the Heart of Liberal Attacks on Mamdani

“When both sides of the political spectrum share an obsession with interrogating one’s racial purity, maybe it’s time to confront an uncomfortable truth: A lot of us are exactly who Donald Trump believes that we are.” @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

New, from me - I wrote a piece on the alarming lessons for other universities from the Columbia settlement

(Contains a lot of arguments I’ve floated about here before!)

www.usnews.com/opinion/arti...

Thanks, Katie!!! 😊😊

😂😂😂😂

Working on it!!!! 😁

I’m so honored!! Thank you :)

Thank you so much!! I’m really looking forward to reading yours when it comes out 🥳

Jessie definitely deserves her own novel!!!

Thank you SO much for taking the time to read it!! You made my day :)

Thanks, Shamus!!! 😁😁

😭 Thank you Estela!!!!