Contact Info

Yale University
Department of
Political Science
77 Prospect Street ISPS,
Room B213
New Haven, CT 06511

Jacob S. Hacker

Director, Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University

Jacob S. Hacker, Ph.D., is the Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is Vice President of the National Academy of Social Insurance, and a former Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

An expert on the politics of U.S. health and social policy, he is the author of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, written with Paul Pierson (2010, paperback 2011), The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream (2006, paperback 2008), The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (2002), and The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President Clinton’s Plan for Health Security (1997), co-winner of the Brownlow Book Award of the National Academy of Public Administration. He is co-author, with Paul Pierson, of Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005) and has edited two volumes—most recently, Health At Risk: America’s Ailing Health System and How to Heal It (2008).

A frequent media commentator, Hacker has testified before Congress, advised leading politicians, and written popular pieces for the American Prospect, New Republic, Nation, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Boston Review, and other publications. He is the author of a 2007 proposal for universal health care, “Health Care forAmerica,” that became a template for several presidential aspirants’ plans.

Most recently with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, he and a group of multi-disciplinary researchers including Greg Huber and Mark Schlesinger of ISPS developed the Economic Security Index (ESI), which measures the share of Americans who experience at least a 25 percent decline in their income from one year to the next. In addition, he oversees a Social Science Research Council project on the “privatization of risk.”

Issues: Anti-Poverty programs, Banking and Finance, Budget and Tax Policy, Business, Capitalism, Corporate Incentives, Developing Economies, Economic Mobility, Economic Theory, Entrepreneurialism, Federal Budget, Financial Markets, Globalization, Healthcare, Housing Market Collapse, International Competition, Jobs, Labor Force, Medicare/Medicaid, Middle Class, Multi-national corporations, Payroll Taxes, Privatization, Retirement, Small Business, Social Insurance, Social Investment, Social Security, Trade, Unemployment Insurance, Unions, Wealth Creation, Welfare

Education:

Ph.D., Political Science, Yale, 2000
B.A., Social Studies, Harvard, 1994

Books:

Jacob Hacker and Ann O’Leary. Shared Responsibility, Shared Risk: Government, Markets and Social Policy in the Twenty-First Century. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Jacob Hacker. Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class(coauthor Paul Pierson, September 2010)

Jacob Hacker. Health at Risk: America’s Ailing Health System—and How to Heal It(editor).

Jacob Hacker. The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement—And How You Can Fight Back (Oxford University Press, October 2006)

Jacob Hacker. Transforming America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality (Joe Soss, Suzanne Mettler, co-editors; Russell Sage Foundation Publications, November 2007)

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