Academic leaders from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School (INET Oxford), the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI), and Nuffield College paid tribute to Professor Brian Nolan and his contributions to research on economic inequality on the occasion of his retirement.
Following a distinguished career at University College Dublin, Brian joined Oxford in 2014 and established and led INET Oxford's Employment Equity & Growth Programme (now the Economics, Innovation & Opportunity programme) for over a decade.
INET Oxford Executive Director Eric Beinhocker credited Brian with helping fundamentally change the way economics understands and thinks about economic inequality, while DSPI’s Head Jane Barlow called Brian 'a giant of the field'.
In total, Brian's research group has produced 263 publications across the following four major projects:
- Employment Equity & Growth - This research programme, supported by the Resolution Foundation, showed that while rich countries have faced common challenges in an era of globalization and rapid technological change, institutions and policies significantly impacted whether improvements in incomes and living standards were shared, or whether those forces drove major increases in inequality.
- The Intergenerational Transmission of Family Wealth - This project, supported by the Nuffield Foundation, investigated patterns of wealth transfer across generations in Great Britain compared with other rich countries and the implications for wealth inequality and taxation.
- The Oxford Martin Programme on Inequality and Prosperity - This programme, supported by Citi in partnership with the Oxford Martin School, examined the drivers of economic inequality and how best to promote inclusive growth.
- Towards a System of Distributional National Accounts – This project, supported by the European Commission and in partnership with the Paris School of Economics and University of California-Berkeley, has been building a set of measures and methodologies that can help policymakers see how their economies distribute income, wealth, and other resources across their populations. Critically, the project is doing this in a way that ties in with existing national accounts methodologies and accepted international standards.
INET Oxford's Executive Director Eric Beinhocker paid tribute to Professor Brian Nolan's work:
"Brian has been a senior leader of the INET Oxford group since earliest days. He joined us almost exactly 10 years ago, in September 2014 and over that decade he has been an extraordinary colleague.
"He built one of our largest and most impactful research programmes. The scholarly output of this group has been hugely impressive and has had significant real-world relevance to debates amongst policymakers, the media, and public.
"One of the things I have most admired about Brian is that not only is he an immensely talented and accomplished scholar himself, but a great attracter and developer of talent. He has built a wonderful and vibrant team of students and postdocs, several of whom are here. Brian’s group have said working with him has been a 'transformative experience' and many have gone on to do great things.
"Brian has managed to do all of this while being the most collegial of colleagues and I know I speak on behalf of the entire INET team when I say we will all greatly miss his smile and good humour around the office.
"I do want to highlight just one major intellectual impact of Brian's work. For a long time in the economics community, inequality was viewed as a kind of state of nature, a natural outcome of market forces. Our late colleague Sir Tony Atkinson once said that prominent economists used to tell him that inequality is ‘not an economic problem’. It might be a social problem, or a political problem, but not an economic problem; and that distributional outcomes simply reflect market forces at work.
"What Brian’s more than a decade of very careful, rigorous, comparative work has conclusively shown is that inequality is not just a natural outcome of market forces, it is a choice. That countries facing very similar technological, trade, and other economic forces can have very different distributional outcomes depending on their policies, how they structure their labour markets, and other institutional choices that shape their economies.
"That statement today may sound like conventional wisdom – but it wasn’t 10 years ago when Brian started and has only become conventional wisdom due to hard work by Brian and his network of colleagues and collaborators. And with that change in perceptions, the dominant narrative has changed as to how politicians and others think about these issues today."
Head of Oxford’s Department for Social Intervention, Professor Jane Barlow also paid tribute to Professor Nolan's legacy:
“Today is a pretty momentous occasion because Brian leaves DSPI and INET Oxford after a decade of outstanding scholarship, entrepreneurship, and collegiality. I’m sure that I don’t just speak for myself when I say that I have always felt Brian to be one of the giants not only in DSPI but in his field more widely, and not only in terms of his achievements, but the way in which he has worked so assiduously and with such generosity to ensure that the next generation are able to stand on his shoulders.
“Brian joined DSPI in 2014 moving from a post of Principal of the College of Human Sciences and Professor of Public Policy at University College, Dublin to DSPI where he took up the post of Professor of Social Policy and Director of INET’s Employment, Equity and Growth Programme, and also a Senior Research Fellowship at Nuffield College Oxford.
“And this move has been a tremendous success, not just for our department and for INET but for the University more widely. From our perspective at DSPI, Brian helped us to continue the long tradition of Barnett House work on poverty and social issues, for which we are best known, and to take this work into some new and important areas.
"Among the elements that Brian’s scholarship brought to DSPI faculty and students have been his pioneering work on the definition and measurement of poverty, and relationship between poverty and concepts such as material deprivation and social exclusion. His contribution to and high reputation in the development of the EU’s social indicators have also been outstand. Plus we teach Brian’s work – especially his critique of social investment as a perspective on the welfare state and his work on different dimensions and determinants of inequalities.
“And two aspects of Brian’s approach in particular that have made him such a major contributor to the Department have been, first, his consummate comparativism, which has deepened our knowledge on variations across Europe and underlined the importance of knowing how and why phenomena vary.
"And second Brian’s analysis of the role of social policy and the welfare state in ameliorating or exacerbating social conditions. To this end, he has contributed major insights on how policy can be reformed, and has had significant influence with policy makers within and across countries in this regard.
"Brian has been one of the giants in our department and also in his field; in astronomy the term giant means a star of relatively great size and luminosity compared to ordinary stars, and 10–100 times the diameter of the sun. Brian, you have indeed been bigger and brighter than most and you I very much hope that you will look back on your entire academic career with satisfaction in the knowledge that yours has indeed been a contribution that really has made the world a better place."
For a full list of the now Professorial Research Fellow Emeritus Brian Nolan's works, see the links below.
