Stanford Report spotlights Michelle Jackson's latest book

Associate Professor Michelle Jackson's latest book, The Division of Rationalized Labor, is featured in the Stanford Report's reading section. The book examines how the division of labor in the United States has evolved over the past 150 years. Drawing on historical and statistical evidence, Jackson argues that the development of probabilistic science provided the foundation for growing job complexity. As researchers learned which levers to pull in order to maximize productivity in a given industry, they created new tasks for the workers who specialized in producing industry outputs. As researchers developed the capacity to predict bad outcomes—criminality, low test scores, poor health—they left police, teachers, doctors, and nurses responsible for increasingly complicated preventive work. Analogous situations arise throughout the labor force, ensuring that workers across the occupational structure are overworked and overwhelmed. Jackson is also the author of Manifesto for a Dream: Inequality, Constraint, and Radical Reform, a critique of contemporary inequality policy and a constructive proposal for radical social reform.