webinar free and open to the public
The recording of this webinar is available on Princeton University's Media Central here.

Ellora Derenoncourt
Assistant Professor of Economics
Princeton University

Ellora Derenoncourt is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University and a member of the Industrial Relations Section of Princeton Economics, where she also directs the Program for Research on Inequality. She works on labor economics, economic history, and the study of inequality. Recently she has studied the northern backlash against the Great Migration, the role of minimum wages in racial earnings inequality, and the long-run evolution of the racial wealth gap. Her work has been featured in the Economist, the New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. She received her PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 2019.

David desJardins
General Partner, DJ Ventures, LP
Patriotic Millionaires

A consultant and investor, David desJardins has degrees from MIT and the University of California at Berkeley. His dissertation involved the analysis of a mathematical game, with applications to information theory. He was among the first 20 employees at Google, where he worked from 1999 to 2005. Since leaving Google, he has been engaged in angel investing, consulting, research, and philanthropy. DesJardins is a member of Patriotic Millionaires, Scholars Strategy Network, and the Democracy Alliance. He serves as a trustee of the University of California Berkeley Foundation, and is a member of the MIT Corporation.

Martin Gilens
Chair, Department of Public Policy; Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Social Welfare
UCLA

Martin Gilens is Chair of the Department of Public Policy and a Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Social Welfare at UCLA. His research examines representation, public opinion, and mass media, especially in relation to inequality and public policy. Professor Gilens is the author of Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, and Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy, and coauthor (with Benjamin I. Page) of Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do about It. He has published widely on political inequality, mass media, race, gender, and welfare politics. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the Russell Sage Foundation. Professor Gilens is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and taught at Yale and Princeton universities before joining the Luskin School at UCLA in 2018. 

Jim Tankersley
White House correspondent, focus on economic policy
The New York Times

Jim Tankersley is a White House correspondent for The New York Times, with a focus on economic policy. Over more than a decade covering politics and economics in Washington, he has written extensively about the stagnation of the American middle class and the decline of economic opportunity in wide swaths of the country. Mr. Tankersley was previously policy and politics editor at Vox and, before that, an economics reporter for The Washington Post. He covered the 2008 presidential campaign for The Chicago Tribune and began his career working for The Oregonian, The Rocky Mountain News and The Toledo Blade. He and a Blade colleague won the 2007 Livingston Award for Young Journalists for a series of stories exploring how and why the Ohio economy declined so dramatically over the course of a generation. He is the author of "The Riches of This Land: The Untold, True Story of America's Middle Class," published in 2020.

Moderated by
Brandice Canes-Wrone
Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs and Professor of Politics
Princeton University

Brandice Canes-Wrone is the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs and Professor of Politics at Princeton University and currently serves as the Director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics (CSDP). She received a PhD from Stanford, an AB from Princeton, and taught at MIT and Northwestern before returning to Princeton as a faculty member. In 2016, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has written extensively on issues related to American politics, political economy, and elections, particularly in the areas of American political institutions, representation, and accountability. Ongoing research projects include the impact of campaign donors on representation, public opinion and government decisionmaking on covid policy, the economic effects of policy uncertainty, and the effects of judicial elections on legal outcomes.