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The Tobin Project: A Catalyst for Transformative Research in the Social Sciences

The Tobin Project is an independent, non-profit research organization motivated by the belief that rigorous scholarship on major, real-world problems can make a profound difference, improving society and strengthening the country. Inspired by Professor James Tobin’s belief that scholars have a vital role to play in the public sphere, the Tobin Project aims to mobilize, motivate, and support a community of scholars across the social sciences and allied fields seeking to deepen our understanding of significant challenges facing the nation over the long term, and to engage policymakers at every step in the research process.

Founded in 2005, the Tobin Project has built an interdisciplinary network of over 350 leading scholars across 80 universities, from Nobel Laureates to the most promising graduate students, who are together working to generate pioneering research on pressing problems of the 21st century. The Tobin Project employs a successful model for how to identify inquiries with the greatest potential to improve society, how to engage a network of top scholars and policymakers around these questions, how to advance these new interdisciplinary research agendas, and how to disseminate compelling ideas with the potential to reshape academic research, public policy discussions, and overall public discourse.

The Tobin Project is currently focused on four core research inquiries:

Government & Markets: What are the conditions that distinguish success from failure in the governance and regulation of the economy?

Institutions of Democracy: What factors and institutions - of government, business, civil society, and beyond - are most central to the functioning of American democracy?

Economic Inequality: What are the consequences of the dramatic and continuing rise of income inequality in the U.S. – for the economy, society, and democracy?

National Security: How can the U.S. sustainably advance its national security interests given fiscal constraints and shifts in the global distribution of power?

Professor James Tobin (1918-2002)

“[K]nowledge advances when striking real-world events and issues pose puzzles we have to try to understand and resolve. The most important decisions a scholar makes are what problems to work on. Choosing them just by looking for gaps in the literature is often not very productive and at worst divorces the literature itself from problems that provide more important and productive lines of inquiry.”
– Professor James Tobin, Essays in Economics, Vol. 4

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