Dr. Charlie Eaton is an economic sociologist and associate professor at the University of California, Merced.
Dr. Eaton investigates the power of elites in politics and the economy, as well as policy and organizational strategies to rebalance power and wealth towards ordinary people. His book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower (University of Chicago Press, 2022), is about the relationship between financialization, student debt, inequalities in higher education, and the rise of financiers among US billionaires. The book won the Pierre Bourdieu best book award from the American Sociological Association.
In his latest research, Dr. Eaton examines how billionaires from finance and from big tech adopted more oligarchical roles in US politics. The project explores the potential of using machine learning to assemble data on billionaire social networks. Eaton writes about this research in his Substack newsletter, Axis of Oligarchy.
Dr. Eaton’s writing and research have been featured by the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Marketplace, CBS, and PBS. His academic research has been published in journals across the social sciences, including American Sociological Review, Review of Financial Studies, Social Forces, Socio-Economic Review, Sociology of Education, Politics & Society, P.S. Political Science and Politics, Research in Higher Education, Sociological Compass, and Socius.
Much of Dr. Eaton’s research uses data carpentry to digitize, link, and construct original data for measuring inequalities in the resources and activities of elites and less powerful social groups. Much of this data is multi-level organizational data. To support open and accessible sharing of this of code and data, Eaton and his collaborators in the Higher Education, Race, and the Economy (HERE) Lab, created the Higher Ed Data Hub.
Professor Eaton received his PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral scholar in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University before joining the faculty in sociology at UC Merced.
