David Deming
Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy
Harvard Kennedy School
DAVID DEMING is the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Faculty Dean of Kirkland House at Harvard College. He also served as the Academic Dean of HKS from 2021 to 2024. Deming is an economist whose research focuses on higher education, economic inequality, skills, technology, and the future of the labor market. He is a Principal Investigator (along with Raj Chetty and John Friedman) at the CLIMB Initiative, an organization that seeks to study and improve the role of higher education in social mobility. He also leads the Project on Workforce, a cross-Harvard initiative on the future of work. He is co-founder of the Harvard Skills Lab, an organization that creates and tests science-backed measures of “soft” skills like teamwork and decision-making. In 2018 he was awarded the David N. Kershaw Prize for distinguished contributions to the field of public policy and management under the age of 40. In 2022 he won the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to Labor Economics. His writing appears in The Atlantic and The New York Times as well as on his substack, Forked Lightning.
DAVID DEMING is the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Faculty Dean of Kirkland House at Harvard College. He also served as the Academic Dean of HKS from 2021 to 2024. Deming is an economist whose research focuses on higher education, economic inequality, skills, technology, and the future of the labor market. He is a Principal Investigator (along with Raj Chetty and John Friedman) at the CLIMB Initiative, an organization that seeks to study and improve the role of higher education in social mobility. He also leads the Project on Workforce, a cross-Harvard initiative on the future of work. He is co-founder of the Harvard Skills Lab, an organization that creates and tests science-backed measures of “soft” skills like teamwork and decision-making. In 2018 he was awarded the David N. Kershaw Prize for distinguished contributions to the field of public policy and management under the age of 40. In 2022 he won the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to Labor Economics. His writing appears in The Atlantic and The New York Times as well as on his substack, Forked Lightning.