Collaborative Research: Science, Technology, and Inequalities

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This collaborative research involves a literature review, background paper, and preliminary data analysis, to be followed by a planning meeting for extension of the concepts to a follow-on international collaborative project, to be proposed separately at a later date. Concern is rising within the United States about inequality. Rapid economic growth and low unemployment have not translated into equal benefits for all. Some observers have linked the growing income gap to technological change and the accompanying shifts in demands for skills. The economy is creating new high-paying jobs for the well educated in the suburbs, leaving less skilled workers behind in the inner cities, and relegating them to minimum-wage service work. Similarly, nations are growing further apart in standard of living. The gap in average income between the richest and poorest countries is also growing. In developed countries, about five percent of the population lives in extreme poverty, while 20 percent do so in Latin America and East Asia, and 40 percent in Africa and South Asia. These gaps are also linked to development strategies, which in turn depend on a nation's skills and technological infrastructure. The research proposed separately but collaboratively by Georgia Tech and AAAS will support the planning phase of a project to explore the role of science and technology policy in the complex dynamics of inequality, and to develop ways to use S&T policy to counteract the centrifugal forces inherent in technological change. Much of the literature attempts to explain income inequality, both domestically and internationally. Income is only a proxy measure, however, for the actual quality of people's lives. This project focuses instead directly on outcome inequalities. It begins from outcomes in four areas of basic human need: health, food/nutrition, environment, peace/security, plus two intermediate outcome areas, information technology and education/employment. In each area, data on outcomes, nationally and internationally, can be used to analyze the effects of and gaps in research agendas that are linked to them through complex webs of institutional links. These analyses then provide us with conceptual tools to develop options for changes in S&T policy that can help improve outcomes for those who are furthest behind in these areas. Based upon the work of the Georgia Tech scholars, AAAS will convene a working meeting of experts familiar with research on inequalities and/or science and technology policy, to review and critique the work to date and to provide guidance in designing an extension of the concepts to an international collaborative project involving scholars from several continents.