Publications
I write a lot about technological change and economic opportunity for disadvantaged populations. Whenever possible, I prefer to make my work free to the public. In that spirit, I hope this site will serve as a repository for many of my works. Books, journal articles, and research reports all find their home in the Publications section of this site.
Equity, Growth, and Community: What the Nation Can Learn from America’s Metro Areas
In the last several years, much has been written about growing economic challenges, increasing income inequality, and political polarization in the United States. This new book by Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor argues that lessons for addressing these national challenges are emerging from a new set of realities in America’s metropolitan regions.
Just Growth:
Inclusion and Prosperity
in America’s
Metropolitan Regions
Breaking new ground in its innovative blend of quantitative and qualitative methods, this book offers specific insights for regional leaders and analysts of metropolitan areas. The authors also draw a broader set of conclusions about how to scale up these efforts to address a U.S. economy still seeking to recover from economic crisis and ameliorate distributional divisions.
Staircases or Treadmills: Labor Market Intermediaries and Economic Opportunity in a Changing Economy
Globalization, technological change, and deregulation have made the American marketplace increasingly competitive in recent decades, but for many workers this “new economy” has entailed heightened job insecurity, lower wages, and scarcer benefits. Chris Benner, Laura Leete, and Manuel Pastor investigate what approaches are most effective in helping workers to secure jobs with decent wages and benefits, and they provide specific policy recommendations for how job-matching organizations can better serve disadvantaged workers.
Work in the New Economy: Flexible Labor Markets in Silicon Valley
This book contributes to our understanding of the transformation of work in the information economy, through a detailed examination of labor markets in Silicon Valley. It provides an insightful analysis of flexible labor including growing volatility in work demands and increasingly tenuous employment relations, contributes to our understanding of the transformation of work in the information economy, provides an original and insightful analysis of flexible labor including growing volatility in work demands and increasingly tenuous employment relations, and shows that some workers clearly thrive in this vibrant context, but many face high levels of insecurity admist growing inequality.
This Could Be the Start of Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity are Transforming Metropolitan America
Often lost in the gloom and doom about American politics is a striking and sometimes underanalyzed phenomenon: the resurgence of progressive politics and movements at a local level. Just as striking as the rise of this progressive resurgence has been its reception among unlikely allies. The usual business resistance to pro-equity policies has changed, particularly when it comes to issues like affordable housing and more efficient transportation systems. To see this change and its possibilities requires that we recognize a new thread running through many local efforts: a perspective and politics that emphasizes “regional equity.”
Local and Global: Management of Cities in the Information Age
This text challenges the belief that cities will eventually disappear as territorial forms of social organization as new information technologies permit the articulation of social processes without regard for distance, arguing that the specific role of cities will become more important, and proposing that a dynamic and creative relationship be built up between the local and the global. In this way, cities will remain the focus of social organization, political management and cultural expression, equipped to deal with the enormous social and environmental problems of urbanization.
Research Reports
On-Demand and on-the-edge: Ride-hailing and Delivery Workers in San Francisco.
Chris Benner, Erin Johansson, Kung Feng and Hays Witt. UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation. May 2020.
In this report, we present the results of a unique, in-person representative survey of on-demand ride-hailing and delivery workers in San Francisco, the home of many of the most prominent companies providing platform-based services, including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart. The central findings are simple and clear—for a large portion of this workforce, despite this being full-time work, they were financially vulnerable before the outbreak, and the crisis is pushing many of them to the brink.
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From Resistance to Renewal: A 12-Step Program for Innovation and Inclusion in the California Economy
by Manuel Pastor and Chris Benner, with Arpita Sharma, Edward Muña, Stina Rosenquist, and Vanessa Carter. USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity and UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation. October 2018
How do we develop a new economy that values and promotes social solidarity? To get there, we need to realize that economic institutions and policies need to do three things: grow employment and the economy, strengthen connections between people and places, and provide security for families and communities. In thinking about how to adjust those basic principles of sustaining growth, deepening connections, and reducing fear in our time and our state, we think that a 12-step program—always handy for recovery from the inequality and racism that has plagued us—is in order
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Still Walking the Lifelong Tightrope: Technology, Insecurity and the Future of Work
Chris Benner, Gabriela Giusta, Louise Auerhahn, Bob Brownstein, Jeffrey Buchanan. UC Santa Cruz Everett Program and Working Partnerships USA. October 2018
Current debates about the future of work, often underpinned by a fear of massive technology-induced job loss, are presented as the result of a dramatic ‘new economy’ associated with intelligent machines, big-data driven algorithms and the gig economy. Yet this new economy has roots that are at least 50 years old (as well as resurrecting ideas like piecework that go back centuries), and many of the most worrying trends we’re experiencing today have been apparent since the early 1990s. The purpose of this report is to update our analysis of the prevalence and causes of economic insecurity and inequality in our information economy. We focus on Silicon Valley, the epicenter of economic restructuring, but we think the lessons learned here have implications far beyond the region.
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Market Value: How Fair Assessment Of California’s Commercial Property Values Would Likely Effect Land Use, Urban Development and the Economy
Chris Benner and Gabriela Giusta, with Justin Scoggins.
The Everett Program. June 2018.
Reforming our property tax system to assess commercial properties at their market value would provide a more equitable tax structure for businesses, while raising additional revenue for essential state services. But what would be the overall economic impact of such a reform? To what extent would increasing property taxes for large land owners hurt the California economy, resulting in lost jobs and economic output? To what exent would it improve economic performance and promote more efficient land use and urban development? The purpose of this study is to help assess the likely impact of reforming California’s commercial property tax structure to tax commercial properties at their market value. In our analysis, we assume that agricultural land is exempted from reform, and that existing protections for all residential property, including multi-family units, remain in place.
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Creating More Inclusive Economies: Conceptual, Measurement and Process Dimensions
Chris Benner, Gabriela Giusta, Gordon McGranahan and Manuel Pastor. UC Santa Cruz Everett Program, with Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at USC and Institute for Development Studies at University of Sussex.
March 2018.
Promoting inclusive economies has become an important theme in international policy discussions, but there remain major gaps in our understanding of the components and determinants of greater economic inclusion. The overall goal of this report is to help contribute to developing a more comprehensive and coherent approach to promoting the development of more inclusive economies.
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Diversity and Inclusion for the 21st Century Economy: An Imperative for Chambers of Commerce
Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor. The Everett Program, with Program for Environmental and Regional Equity USC and Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives. February 2017.
In response to changing market forces, demographic differentiation, and political fragmentation local and metro chambers are finding themselves stepping into a broader role to fill a gap between state/federal government and local needs. This report provides examples and data, as well as a dialogue, on necessary actions that can help guide our cities, metros, and states to shared prosperity.
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Changing States: A Framework for Progressive Governance
Manuel Pastor, Jennifer Ito and Madeline Wander, with contributions by Chris Benner, Vanessa Carter, Robert Chlala, Jared Sanchez, and Alejandro Sanchez-Lopez. USC: Program for Environmental and Regional Equity. May 2016.
This report provides an effective framework for analyzing possibilities and charting pathways to power in the future. We stress how states can and should become the battleground for forging a progressive national movement. But we do not stop there: We offer an open-source approach that can be applied at multiple geographic scales, to multiple issue areas, and to multiple arenas to contest power. Based on two years of quantitative and qualitative analysis, a series of field visits to five very different states, and vetting and discussion with experts on, and organizers of, social movements, we emphasize three main shifts in thinking, three main dimensions for analyzing possibilities,
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Silicon Valley Technology Industries Contract Workforce Assessment
Chris Benner, Kyle Neering. The Everett Program. March 2016.
Income inequality in Silicon Valley has been growing dramatically in recent years. One factor contributing to this inequality is the conditions of contract workers to high-tech firms. While prominent Silicon Valley companies are experiencing records revenues and profits, and wages of their direct employees are generally above average, many contract employees are excluded from these benefits. Little is known about the true size and scope of contracting work to hightech firms in Silicon Valley, or the overall socio-economic circumstances of contract employees. Studying the largely invisible contract workforce is difficult, given the lack of direct data on the nature of employment contracts. We instead develop an indirect methodology to identify what we call the potentially contracted workforce to high tech firms. While only an approximation, we believe this provides a reasonable estimate of the overall size and scope of this workforce, and provides a good picture of the demographic characteristics, wages, and socio-economic circumstances of this population.
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Wages and Working Conditions in Arkansas Poultry Plants
, with research and writing support provided by Nina Ebner, Jessica Halpern-Finnerty, Saru Jayaraman, Miya Cain, Amber Moulton and Chris Benner.
Contributing over $30 billion in 2013, the poultry industry is large and important to the nation’s economy.13 The Meat Institute claims that meat and poultry’s “ripple effect” contributes a full 6% to total GDP.14 Since 12% of all poultry processing jobs are concentrated in Arkansas, this study examines wages and working conditions for poultry workers there, as well as consider the impacts of these conditions on consumers.
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Journal Articles
Is Talk Cheap? Dialogue, Diversity, and Our Economic Future
Contested Spaces and Subjectivities of Transit: Political Ecology of a Bus Rapid Transit Development in Oakland, California
Whither Resilient Regions? Equity, Growth and Community
Chris Benner, Manuel Pastor
Journal of Urban Affairs, vol. 38
2016
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Low-Wage Jobs-Housing Fit: Identifying Locations of Affordable Housing Shortages
Chris Benner, Alex Karner.
Urban Geography, vol. 37, no. 6
2016
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Creating More Inclusive Economies: Conceptual, Measurement and Process Dimensions
Chris Benner, Manuel Pastor
Journal of Planning Education and Research, vol. 35, no. 3
2015
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To view publications written prior to 2015, visit the Archives Page