Special Lectures

Dr. Ran Abramitzky

Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success

Immigration is one of the most fraught, and possibly most misunderstood, topics in American social discourse. But in most cases, the things we believe about immigration are based largely on myth, not facts. In Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success, Stanford Professor Ran Abramitzky uses the tools of modern data analysis to present new evidence about the past and present of the American Dream and debunk immigration myths fostered by political opportunism.

Ran Abramitzky is the Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor of Economics and the Senior Associate Dean of the Social Sciences at Stanford University. His research is in economic history and applied microeconomics, with focus on immigration and income inequality. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is the former co-editor of Explorations in Economic History. His awards include the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and grants from the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. His first book, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World (Princeton University Press, 2018) was awarded by the Economic History Association the Gyorgi Ranki Biennial Prize for an outstanding book on European Economic History. His new book (with Leah Boustan) is Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success (PublicAffairs 2022). He has received the Economics Department’s and the Dean’s Awards for Distinguished Teaching. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University.