Christopher Jencks, a Shaper of Views on Economic Inequality, Dies at 88

Christopher Jencks, a highly regarded sociologist who helped transform public and expert opinion on complex policy issues like homelessness, income inequality and racial gaps in standardized testing, died on Saturday at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 88.

His wife, the political scientist Jane Mansbridge, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

Mr. Jencks had an unconventional background for an academic social scientist: He had an undergraduate degree in English literature, followed by a stint as an opinion journalist, and despite holding an endowed chair in sociology at Harvard, he never earned a doctorate.

If anything, that background seemed to help him. In books and articles, he wrote clear, concise sentences backed by finely honed data, presenting arguments that cut to the quick of policy debates, often in novel ways that defied traditional left-right divisions.

His 1994 book, “The Homeless,” is a case in point. In a mere 176 pages, including endnotes, he offered a dramatically lower estimate of the country’s homeless population than what was assumed at the time: less than 300,000, versus the accepted estimate of up to 3 million, a number, he said, that had been inflated to draw attention to the issue.

He then walked through the reasons homelessness was rising — including cuts to social services and the closing of mental institutions — following this explanation with a suite of often surprising prescriptions, including bringing back “Skid Row” neighborhoods.

His 1972 report, “Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America,” written with seven associates at Harvard, did something similar with education, drawing on reams of data amassed during the 1960s to show that, contrary to many policymakers’ hopes, there were limits to what education reform could do to lessen income inequality.

The book was widely hailed, and just as widely misread; he was not arguing against education, as some thought, but rather showing its limits in the inequality debate. Instead, he argued for much more direct and significant policies, like tax credits and other income supports.

Mr. Jencks also proved refreshingly willing to change his mind when the situation changed. By the 1990s, he had shifted his position on education somewhat; as manufacturing jobs declined and the demand for skilled workers grew, the benefits of education, he said, had become more pronounced.

Though he joined Harvard as a lecturer in 1967 and spent the rest of his career in academia, he kept a foothold in journalism. In 1973, he helped found Working Papers for a New Society, a wonky periodical dedicated to sifting through the successes and failures of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

In 1990, he and several other journalistically inclined social scientists founded The American Prospect, a left-of-center magazine; with Kathryn Edin, he wrote one of its first feature articles.

That article, “The Real Welfare Problem,” was vintage Jencks. It grew out of an observation by Dr. Edin, who had been his graduate student, about the large number of aid recipients who worked under the table to make ends meet.

As the writers showed through meticulous analysis, the problem was not greedy welfare cheats but a pernicious aspect of the system: It paid too little, and cut that support further as soon as people looked for other means of income. That insight did much to frame the debate over welfare reform in the 1990s.

“Most people assume that low benefits just force recipients to live frugally,” they wrote. “But low benefits have another, more sinister effect that neither conservatives nor liberals like to acknowledge: they force most welfare recipients to lie and cheat in order to survive.”

Christopher Jencks was born on Oct. 22, 1936, in Baltimore. His parents initially chose to forgo a middle name for him, then changed their minds and gave him “Sandys,” a pluralized version of a childhood nickname.

His father, Francis, was an architect, and his mother, Elizabeth (Pleasants) Jencks, oversaw the household. The Jencks were wealthy, and Christopher was educated at expensive private schools, including Phillips Exeter, from which he graduated in 1954.

He earned an English degree from Harvard in 1958 and a master’s degree in human development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1959.

Moving to Washington, he wrote for and helped edit The New Republic and was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank.

His first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Dr. Mansbridge, whom he married in 1976, he is survived by their son, Nat; their grandson; and a brother, Stephen.

Mr. Jencks moved to Northwestern University in 1979 and returned to Harvard in 1996. He retired in 2016.

Though he retained a willingness to buck liberal orthodoxies where the data demanded it, Mr. Jencks remained at heart a believer in the need for large-scale government interventions to alleviate inequality.

He insisted that, in the main, the War on Poverty had worked, even as many liberals in the 1980s and ’90s were turning against such programs.

The problem, he said, was one of perception: People expected wealth-transfer programs, like Medicaid and Aid to Families With Dependent Children, to solve a host of social ills, not just eliminate income disparities — something they were unable to do.

“The remedies for crime and family breakdown lie much deeper, requiring changes in the fundamental character of our society, not just a few innovative government programs,” Mr. Jencks said in a 1996 speech at the American Enterprise Institute. “But that is a story for another time.”