Miller's parents immigrated separately as teenagers from Tagancha and Stepanitz, two shtetls in Ukraine. Miller grew up poor in Philadelphia and New York with prolonged periods of homelessness. A graduate of
Brooklyn College,
Princeton University and
Columbia University, Miller taught for many years at Boston University in its Sociology Department, where he also chaired the department. Miller has also held distinguished research and teaching positions at numerous other universities, including Brooklyn College (1961–63), Syracuse University (1961–65)
, Boston College,
New York University, the
London School of Economics,
Cornell University, and
Harvard University. Miller co-founded
Ideas for Action in the late 1940s, a magazine that brought social science ideas to union and community activists. He helped found
Social Policy and remained a contributing editor for three decades. During the
Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, he organized and chaired a social science advisory committee to the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He also joined the
Ford Foundation, and initiated the Foundation's support of Latino advocacy groups and grants to CORE, the
National Urban League, and the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He wrote speeches for
Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the economic policy appendix in
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, King's 1967 Annual Report to the SCLC. He was also active in the areas of welfare rights and anti-poverty policies. Miller was involved with national policy creation, community organizations, and consulting in China, Ireland, Israel, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Malaysia, the
Soviet Union, and
the United States. Miller was also a consultant or advisor to numerous international organizations, including the Comparative Research Program on Poverty, the
International Social Science Council, the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the
Home Office, Transitional Employment Enterprises,
ATD-Le Quart Monde, and other national and local poverty organizations. The
European Union's poverty policy is based on his perspectives. Miller's contributions to academic sociology included the concepts of fieldwork over-rapport, educational
credentialism, and identifying the birth of neoliberal ideology. Miller was especially well known for his writing on inequality. For example, in 1970, Miller and Roby published the book
The Future of Inequality, in which they criticized the notion that poverty is only a matter of economic insufficiency. They argued that if the United States was to satisfy the needs of the poor, poverty had to be viewed as an issue of inequality rather than simply physical survival. They also broke away from the narrow concentration on income to closely examine other pressing dimensions of inequality such as the distribution of assets, basic services, opportunity for education and social mobility, participation in decision making, and self-respect. They maintained that these social and economic inequities were the roots of the grave problems facing America, and identified social policies and political coalitions that could reduce them. In
Recapitalizing America, Miller and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey described the large shift in American political economy that would later come to be called neo-liberalism and correctly predicted it would exacerbate inequalities and stall progress toward a more equal opportunity society. == Personal life ==