Christopher Jencks, 1936-2025: An Innovative Voice on Inequality
Christopher Jencks, known for his novel and inventive opinions on hot topic issues like income inequality, homelessness, and racial gaps in standardized testing, died on February 8, 2025. He was 88.
While he was a sociologist by trade and was the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy, Emeritus at Harvard University at his death, Jencks received an undergraduate degree in English literature, and never received a doctorate degree. However, this unorthodox background for an academic gave Jencks the permission he needed to write in a clear and accessible style while offering his readers sophisticated, data-driven arguments on the pressing public policy debates.
Among the many impactful contributions that Jencks offered throughout his lifetime, his book The Homeless sits near the top of the list. Published in 1994, Jencks used this book as an opportunity to offer his own estimate of the country’s homeless population: less than 300,000 people. This number contrasted the commonly held estimate of approximately 3 million. According to Jencks, this number was exaggerated only to draw attention to this pressing issue.
Jencks then went on to share the reasons he believed the rates of homelessness were increasing – including social services cuts and the closure of mental institutions. He offered a variety of solutions to address this growing problem – amongst them was the controversial recommendation to revive “Skid Row” neighborhoods. His revision of the count did not signify a lack of compassion. “Daily contact with the homeless,” he wrote in The Homeless, “also raises troubling and ultimately unanswerable questions about our moral obligations to strangers. At a political level, the spread of homelessness suggests that something has gone fundamentally wrong with America’s economic or social institutions.”
His take on inequality was just as important. In 1972, Jencks co-authored a report titled Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America, which utilized data to show that there were clear limitations on the ability of education reform to minimize income equality. This bold statement contrasted with the hopes of policymakers and incited a tidal wave of pushback from critics who thought he was arguing against education.
But Jencks wasn’t undermining the importance of education. Instead, he used the report to argue for more direct and significant solutions for the income inequality problem, like tax credits and other income initiatives. Still, his opinions changed throughout time. Within a couple years, Jencks began shifting his thoughts on education, finding that its benefits had become increasingly important in a world where the need for skilled workers skyrocketed.
Jencks spent most of his career in academia, working at Harvard as a lecturer in 1967 and bringing attention to the shortcomings of various social policy interventions. Still, he kept one foot in the world of journalism. By 1973, Jencks helped found a periodical called the Working Papers for New Society that exclusively focused on analyzing the short-comings and successes of former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. As with his other examinations, his precis was hardly doctrinaire. As he said in the 1996 Bradley Lecture for the American Enterprise Institute:
Conservatives say it failed because it ignored human nature, rewarded bad behavior, focused on equalizing outcomes instead of equalizing opportunity, and relied too heavily on the government rather than the private sector.
Liberals say it failed because we were never serious about it, because we didn’t spend enough money, and because the affluent were ultimately unwilling even to equalize even opportunity, much less results.
Yet despite this broad consensus, I think that when we look at those programs one by one, they provide evidence that the biggest social programs generally achieve what they seek to achieve. That raises a question, though. If these programs do what they are supposed to do, why are so many people convinced that they failed. The answer, I think, is that while the nominal goal of these programs is to reduce poverty and improve material well-being, they have been sold to the public as cures for a multitude of other ills, ranging from crime and ignorance to substance abuse and family breakdown. Unfortunately, that was–and is–claiming too much.
But Jencks didn’t stop there. In 1990, he and a handful of other social scientists founded a left-leaning magazine, The American Prospect. Joined by Kathryn Edin, Jenk’s first contribution to the magazine was an article called The Real Welfare Problem, and it focused on the vast number of aid recipients having to do shifty things to make ends meet.
In normal Jencks fashion, he pulled back the curtain on the real problem of the welfare system: the pay was far too little, and when anyone tried to find other means of income, their support was cut.
“But low benefits have another, more sinister effect that neither conservatives nor liberals like to acknowledge: they force most welfare recipients to lie and cheat in order to survive,” they wrote.
As expected, this notion would go on to frame the conversation around welfare reform throughout the 1990s.
Christopher “Sandy” Jencks was born on October 22, 1936, in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, Francis, was an architect, while his mother, Elizabeth, managed the household. Their family was wealthy, allowing Christopher to learn at the top private schools. In 1954, he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy.
Jencks received his Harvard English degree in 1958 and went on to graduate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1959 with a master’s degree in human development. Following graduation, Jencks relocated to Washington, where he worked as an editor at The New Republic and served as a fellow for a left-leaning think tank called the Institute of Policy Studies.
In 1979, he moved to Northwestern University. By 1996, Jencks returned to his alma mater where he completed his career before retiring in 2016. He was twice a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in 1997-98 and in 2001-02. One result of that fellowship was the 1998 book The black-white test score gap, which he co-edited with Meredith Phillips.
The American Sociological Association awarded him its Willard Waller Award for lifetime achievement in 1992, specifically citing his contributions to the sociology of education. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 and the American Philosophical Society in 2004.
At Harvard, in 1998 he co-founded the Harvard Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy, which is now called the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy. The Harvard Kennedy School quoted Deirdre Bloome, who directs the Stone Program, as saying Jencks was “a true giant in the field of inequality and social policy. He reoriented our thinking about the most pressing problems of our times by asking important questions, answering them with the utmost empirical rigor, and communicating the answers through engaging prose. Sandy’s devotion to ferreting out the truth, whatever it might be, inspired generations of scholars across disciplines.”
He retired from Harvard in 2016, serving as a professor emeritus.
Jencks married three times, the last to the political scientist Jane Mansbridge in 1976. Together, they had one son, Nat. According to Dr. Mansbridge, her husband died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
