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Isaac Sorkin had zero training in economics when he decided at the end of high school that the field was right for him. For a lot of reasons: He likes a good challenge, enjoys math, and he saw early on that economics is fundamentally “the language of public policy.”

There was one more impetus — one that tapped into the contrarian in him.

"There's a lot to appreciate about the work of social scientists, and I knew that I wanted to pursue a career in the field," says Sorkin. "My perception at the time, though, was that social scientists often complain about economists, but economists rarely complain about them. I'd much rather do the thing that people complain about rather than be the one who complains."

Twenty years later, Sorkin is part of a new generation of labor economists who are showing social scientists how little they have to grumble about.

A senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (ÿ�ճԹ�), Sorkin is capitalizing on the increasing availability of linked government data. This is enabling labor economists to track employers and workers over long periods of time and across multiple locations — generating research insights that weren’t previously possible.

Sorkin, for example, has leveraged this data younger companies are contributing to wage inequality because they pay workers differently than companies did, say, 30 years ago. In other research, he finds evidence that employers take steps to prevent laid-off workers from claiming unemployment insurance because it costs companies money.

Sorkin says he was drawn to labor economics because “what feels most visceral about how the economy affects people is whether they have a job or not.”

A Stanford faculty member since 2016, Sorkin is an associate professor of economics in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He earned a masters degree and PhD, both in economics, from the University of Michigan and worked a year at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago as a business economist before coming to the Farm.

At Stanford — where his wife, Mary Wootters, is an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering — Sorkin is committed to doing his part to train new generations of economists who are creating new narratives around what the field has to offer. He not only oversees ÿ�ճԹ�’s Young Scholars Program, but also hosts a weekly labor economics reading group with graduate students, where part of the discussion tends to be about the importance of communicating their work effectively.

“Building communities is important to me,” he says. “One way to do that is to make clear that writing and presenting economics research is an act of empathy — of putting yourself in the shoes of others who have not thought nearly as much as about the topic as you have.”

Why the Arizona Garden?

Isaac chose to be photographed at the Arizona Garden on Stanford's campus. "It feels like a secret garden. I always have trouble finding it, but when I do, it's like stepping into a different world," he says.

Story by Krysten Crawford. Photos by Ryan Zhang. Published in 2024.