Social Sciences (Faculty & Staff)

Young Berkeley idealists shape ‘real policy for real people’ in Sacramento

August 14, 2025

On a sunny summer morning in Sacramento, Janet Mendoza-Partida was walking from her office at the California Department of Education along tree-lined streets to the state Capitol, a thoughtful young woman explaining why she feels divided between two worlds.

Her parents are Mexican immigrants who raised their children in Watsonville — her father a farmworker, her mother a childcare provider. Even a few years ago, before starting studies at UC Berkeley, Mendoza-Partida said she could not see far beyond the agricultural community where she grew up and dreamed of being a teacher....

‘Language is everywhere’: UC Berkeley linguistics expert on time travel, talking to whales, and the ‘sacred’ role of libraries

August 11, 2025

Whale whisperer. Time traveler. Robot wrangler.

For Gašper Beguš, associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, it’s all in a day’s work.

Beguš’ love of languages started early. In elementary school in Slovenia, his education included learning the language of his home country, of course. But it also offered a hearty helping of linguistics, the scientific study of words, their meanings, and their past lives. He remembers coming across an etymological dictionary as a teenager, enraptured by the hidden world revealed between its covers.

“By the time I was in high...

Social Sciences in the News: Linguistics Professor Nicole Holliday in Rolling Stone

August 11, 2025

This article from Rolling Stone features Linguistics Professor Nicole Holliday.

Clanker. Wireback. Cogsucker. People are feeling the inescapable inevitability of AI developments, the encroaching of the digital into everything from entertainment to work. And their answer? Slurs.

AI is everywhere — on Google summarizing search results and siphoning web traffic from...

Social Sciences in the News: Economics professors in The New Yorker

August 11, 2025

This article from The New Yorker features Saru Jayaraman, founder of the UC Berkeley Food Labor Research Center; Michael Reich, an economics professor and David Card, an economics professor and Nobel laureate.

Hearings before the Commerce Committee of the Arizona House of Representatives normally draw a modest crowd of lobbyists in suits. On March 19, 2024, a throng of people in more casual attire appeared. They wore matching green T-shirts adorned with the message “Save Our Tips.” The slogan caught the eye of Analise Ortiz, a Democrat on the committee. She assumed that the...

Stone Center at UC Berkeley receives $4.85M gift for the study of wealth and income inequality

July 14, 2022

BERKELEY, CA — Wealth inequality exceeds historic records in the United States, as can be clearly seen in the research done by Gabriel Zucman, Associate Professor of Economics at the UC Berkeley Department of Economics and Faculty Director of The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley. Thanks to a new gift of $4.85 million to the Stone Center, Zucman and co-directors Professor Emmanuel Saez and Professor Hilary Hoynes will lead an...

New research by Gabriel Zucman, Director of The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley, on the ownership of properties in Dubai

May 3, 2022

New research on the ownership of about 800,000 properties in Dubai co-authored By Gabriel Zucman, Director of The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley offers a unique window into cross-border real estate investments. Read more

Stone Center Leaders at the Heart of Major Economic Debate

February 27, 2024

The Atlantic explores how Stone Center co-directors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman's pioneering inequality research sparked an intense academic controversy—and why their work continues to transform politics and policy.


The article positions Stone Center co-directors as the pioneering economists whose work "transformed domestic politics" and convinced President Obama that inequality was "the defining issue of our time." When rival researchers challenged their findings, Saez and Zucman didn't just defend their methodology—they advanced it, with Zucman's latest research revealing...

Emmanuel Saez and Lawrence H. Summers discuss Wealth Tax

July 30, 2025

Emmanuel Saez(link is external), professor of economics and director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence H. Summers(link is external), the Charles W....

Berkeley Talks: Economist Gabriel Zucman on the benefits of a (modest) billionaire tax

July 29, 2025

In this Berkeley Talks episode, economist Gabriel Zucman discusses how wealth inequality and billionaire wealth has soared in recent decades, prompting the need for a global minimum tax of 2% on billionaires.

“The key benefit of a global minimum tax on billionaires is not only that it would generate substantial revenue for governments worldwide — about $250 billion a year — but also, and maybe most importantly, that it would restore a sense of fairness,” says Zucman, a...

UC Berkeley study finds immigrants more likely to earn STEM degrees

July 29, 2025

Immigrants of all racial and ethnic groups are equally or more likely to hold STEM degrees than their U.S.-born white peers, according to a new study from UC Berkeley Visiting Research Professor Byeongdon Oh, who has coined the term “STEM immigration” to describe the growing trend.

Published recently in SageJournals, Oh’s paper — STEM Immigration and U.S. STEM Workforce Development at the Intersections of Race/...