Jacob Hacker

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jacob Hacker is Professor of Political Science at Yale and well known for his work on social policy, health care reform, and economic insecurity in the United States. His most recent book, The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, (2008 paperback) lays out the argument that America's middle class has grown more insecure over the last 30 years, as problems once confined to the working poor -- loss or lack of health insurance and guaranteed pensions, job insecurity and mounting personal debt -- have moved up the income ladder to become a normal part of middle-class life.

[edit] Biography

Hacker is a frequent media contributer and testifies before the United States Congress often. Considered the intellectual "It Boy" of the Democratic party^[1], he is widely recognized as the architect of the health care plans for all three of the leading Democratic candidates -- Obama, Clinton, and Edwards -- in the presidential race of 2008.^[2] Hacker's plan, "Health Care for America," is outlined in a report for the Economic Policy Institute. It proposes providing health care for uninsured or underinsured Americans by requiring employers to either provide insurance to their workers or enroll them in a new, publicly overseen insurance pool. People in this pool could choose either a public plan modeled after Medicare or from regulated private plans.

He is a Fellow at the New American Foundation, and in 2007 he co-chaired the National Academy of Social Insurance's conference, "For the Common Good." In 2007 he was also given funding by the Rockefeller Foundation to head a multi-year project to develop a comprehensive "Economic Security Index." He oversees a Social Science Research Council project on the "privatization of risk," and is also completing a book on inequality and American democracy, Winner-Take-All Politics: Inequality and the Transformation of American Politics (with Paul Pierson).

Hacker was born in 1971 and grew up in Eugene, Oregon. He graduated summa cum laude in 1994 from Harvard with a B.A. in Social Studies, and he received his PhD from Yale in Political Science in 2000. His first book, The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President Clinton's Plan for Health Security, was published in 1997, while he was a graduate student at Yale.

[edit] Books published

The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, Oxford University Press, 2006, (paperback 2008).

Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, with Paul Pierson, Yale University Press, 2005, (paperback 2006).

The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President's Clinton's Plan for Health Security, Princeton University Press, 1997.

[edit] References

1. ^ David Leonhardt, The New York Times Book Review, October 29, 2006
2. ^ Julie Rosner and Melissa Block, NPR News, February 22, 2008

1. David Leonhardt, The New York Times Book Review, October 29, 2006.
2. Julie Rosner and Melissa Block, NPR News, February 22, 2008.