After a university career spanning nearly fifty years at Boston College, UMass Boston, and Northeastern University, Barry Bluestone is now a Professor Emeritus at Northeastern. Arriving at Northeastern in 1999, he became the founding Director of the university’s Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy and in 2008 became the founding Dean of the university’s School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs.
Professor Bluestone was raised in Detroit, Michigan and attended the University of Michigan where he received his B.A. (1966), M.A. (1968), and his Ph.D. in labor economics in 1974.
As a political economist, Bluestone has written widely in the areas of affordable housing, income distribution, industrial policy, labor-management relations, and urban and regional economic development. He contributes regularly to academic, as well as popular journals, and is the co-author of eleven books including The Boston Renaissance: Race, Space, and Economic Change in an American Metropolis (2000) and The Urban Experience: Economics, Society, and Public Policy (2008). Earlier co-authored books included The Deindustrialization of America (1982) which detailed the loss of manufacturing in the U.S. and its consequences for workers, their families, and their communities and The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America (1988), the first major research detailing growing inequality in the U.S.
As part of his work, Bluestone spends a considerable amount of time consulting with civic organizations, community foundations, industry groups, housing developers, trade unions, and with various federal and state government agencies.
He is board chair of the Mistral Chamber Music group in Brookline, Massachusetts, a member of the board of the Payomet Performing Arts Center on Cape Cod, and serves as president of both the Madison Park High School Technical Foundation in Boston and Housing Forward Massachusetts.
We have been good friends for decades. I first met Barry in 1982 when I wrote a review of The Deindustrialization of America for the Boston Review where I was a social science editor. His work on inequality is prescient. He advised me numerous times over the years, and presented at EPIIC’s Global Inequities Symposium in 2002 and Global Cities symposium in 2009.
We sit together on the Mistral Chamber Music Group’s Advisory Board. We share dreams for a “Black Mountain College” model for community students on Cape Cod, where we both have homes in Truro.