Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work

Starting in July 2025, 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.

The new Stone Center at MIT will study the decline in labor market opportunities for non-college workers in recent decades and the interplay between work, technologies, and wealth inequality. 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.

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.    

With support from the Stone Foundation, the center will advance cutting-edge research and inform policy.