| 1 | Name: | Dr. Michael Hout | |
| Institution: | New York University; University of California, Berkeley | ||
| Year Elected: | 2006 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1950 | ||
Michael Hout's research is highly influential not only in his own field of sociology, but also in demography, political science and that part of economics concerned with inequality. In a continuing series of heavily cited papers and books in such disparate problem areas as stratification, demography, religion and methodology, he has demonstrated a keen sense for important (and socially significant) problems and has deployed highly sophisticated skills in empirical research and modeling. Much of his work has focused on using demographic methods to study intergenerational social mobility, especially as it is affected by educational attainment, not only in the United States but also in Ireland, Russia, and Sweden, as well as the effects of intermarriage and subjective identification on the size of ethnic groups, and the importance of religious identification in the United States. His methodological contributions have been in modeling social processes such as delinquency. His Mobility Tables has instructed generations of researchers in stratification. As a co-author of Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth, he judiciously but effectively dismantled the claim that differences in social standing and achievement are primarily the result of innate differences in intelligence. A graduate of Indiana University (Ph.D., 1976), Dr. Hout served as Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Joint Program in Demography and Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had taught since 1985. He became Natalie Cohen Professor of Sociology and Demography Emeritus in June 2013 and moved to New York University where is Professor of Sociology. | |||