Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

In a 2017 National Public Radio Hidden Brain interview with Currid-Halkett, Shankar Vedantam summarizes her research as a study of the social networks of elites.

Currid-Halkett extended this argument to a comparative analysis with Los Angeles where she and MIT professor Sarah Williams looked at Getty Images photographic data of thousands of entertainment events to track the social life of creative people in a project entitled "The Geography of Buzz".

[4] In a 2014 paper in PLOS One, Currid-Halkett and Williams used cell phone data and social media to track and analyze the creative process of New York City fashion industry workers.

"[20] Currid-Halkett's 2017 book The Sum of Small Things has been reviewed as a convincing account of the role of consumption and cultural practices in today's growing inequality.

[21] David Brooks argued in The New York Times that Currid-Halkett's study of invisible cultural signals offers another means to understand class barriers in America.

Her book The Sum of Small Things anatomises it using fascinating American consumption data….Her intellectual ancestor Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 study The Theory of the Leisure Class, portrayed Wasps frittering away money, but today's cultural elite is engaged in a ruthless project to reproduce its social position… No wonder the key rite of cultural-elite conversation has become Trump-dissing… And so the cultural wars that got him elected rage on.