Professor Dorian Warren helped to convene the first Elites Research Network conference in October 2010 to debate and exchange strategies for studying elites and inequality. In an interview with The New York Times, Professor Warren explained that the increasing inequality of wealth in the U.S. has created a need to look closely at the wealthiest one percent of Americans.
The conference brought together political scientists, economists, historians, sociologists, and others, whose range of disciplinary expertise generated a corresponding variety of approaches to defining and examining elites and power dynamics.