 | Michael Wallerstein |
Noted research scholar on economic equality
Michael Wallerstein, the Charlotte Marion Saden Professor of Political Science and a leading researcher in the study of economic equality and social justice, died of brain cancer on Jan. 7, just a few days before his 55th birthday, at his home in New Haven.
Wallerstein was noted in his field for using rigorous methods of political economy to study politically relevant questions, and particularly for his work on redistribution and inequality in advanced democracies.
While still a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he co-authored, with his adviser, Adam Przeworksi, an article showing that because governments in market economies are dependent on investment for future economic growth, they are especially sensitive to the needs of business. In later articles, Wallerstein demonstrated that it is more expensive to organize workers into trade unions in larger countries than in small; that powerful labor unions can reduce wage inequality without increasing unemployment; and that more centralized unions have large effects on the reduction of wage inequality. He also investigated how Social Democracy, such as that found in the Scandinavian nations, can counteract the inefficiencies and inequities of a market society. One of his most recent articles, co-authored with David Austen-Smith, established that racial divisions in a society reduce political support for welfare spending, even if voters do not hold specifically racist opinions.
Wallerstein's books include "Trade Union Behavior, Pay Bargaining and Economic Performance" (with Robert Flanagan and Karl Ove Moene) and the forthcoming "Globalization and Egalitarian Redistribution" (with Pranab Bardhan and Samuel Bowles).
"Wallerstein was not only a talented researcher (for which he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005), he was a committed and generous teacher and colleague," said Austen-Smith, a former colleague at Northwestern who largely credits Wallerstein for his own decision to join the faculty there.
Peter Swenson, chair of the political science department at Yale, said: "Michael was one of my dearest friends. He was a profoundly honest man. I'm not sure I'll meet anyone again with Michael's humble nature combined with a razor-sharp intelligence. And no one had more influence on my own work. He was always the person I turned to when I wanted to try out this or that half-baked idea or develop my arguments, and he always had time, no matter what. I think he treated everyone that way."
Wallerstein was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1951. He earned his undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1974, and his Ph.D. degree in political science from the University of Chicago in 1985. He taught from 1984 to 1994 at the University of California at Los Angeles, and then joined the faculty at Northwestern University for another decade, where he served as chair of the political science department. He moved to Yale in 2004, where he was named to the Saden endowed chair in political science. He taught courses on comparative politics, the political economy of advanced industrial societies and formal political economy.
Wallerstein's work received support from the National Science Foundation, the Norwegian Research Council and the MacArthur Foundation. He was a scientific adviser for the Foundation for Research in Economic and Business Administration in Norway, where he had been a visiting scholar at both the University of Oslo and at the Institute for Social Research. He was a member of the scientific committee of the Center for the Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, Spain, where he visited and taught regularly. He served on the executive council of the American Political Science Association, was a member of its Task Force on Graduate Education and was president of the association's Organized Section in Comparative Politics.
Wallerstein's honors included election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. In 1985, he received the Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper presented at the annual political science meetings, and in 1999, an article he authored was runner-up for the Gregory Luebbert Award in comparative politics.
A passionate connoisseur of jazz, Wallerstein owned an extensive collection of music and spent the last weeks of life listening to his favorite jazz records, along with Motown and blues.
He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Atlas, whom he met as a student on an archaeological dig in Mexico; his children, Jonah and Hannah Wallerstein; his parents, Robert and Judith Wallerstein of Belvedere, California; his sisters, Nina Wallerstein of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Amy Friedman of Piedmont, California; and a niece and two nephews.
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