Measuring Social and Economic Inequality Across Cultures and Over Time

The ENDOW project (Economic Networks and the Dynamics of Wealth Inequality) is a longitudinal, cross-cultural study investigating the relationship between social networks and material wealth inequality across approximately 50 communities in more than 30 countries around the world. Bringing together ethnographers, economists, statisticians, and network scientists, the project has been building since its inception in 2017 to the longitudinal data that are imminently on hand, as ethnographers complete their second wave of data collection.

This working group will convene ENDOW data contributors and project collaborators to review cross-sectional findings from the first wave of data, engage with the statistical and network modelling approaches being developed for comparative and longitudinal analyses, and coordinate the next steps for integrating the second wave of data into a shared, open-access database. By bringing together the ethnographers who gathered the data with the researchers leading the analyses, the meeting aims to ensure that the project's models are grounded in the realities of fieldwork across diverse cultural and ecological contexts, and that the research is genuinely inclusive of the interests and concerns of our whole team.