Jacob S. Hacker is Stanley Resor Professor of Political Science and director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. A regular media commentator and policy adviser, he has produced a wide range of popular writings on American politics and public policy, particularly on the evolution and implications of America’s patchwork of laws, regulations, and institutional arrangements.
Hacker is the author of Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in the Age of Extreme Inequality, written with Paul Pierson (2020); American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper, written with Paul Pierson (2016, paperback 2017; a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and a best business book of 2016, according to the management magazine Strategy+Business); Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, 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 also co-author, with Paul Pierson, of Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005) and has edited three volumes—most recently, Shared Responsibility, Shared Risk: Government, Markets, and Social Policy in the Twenty-First Century, edited with Ann O’ Leary (2012).
Hacker is known for his research and writings regarding health policy, especially his development of the so-called public option. He is also a member of the OECD’s High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.
He is also a board member of The Century Foundation, Economic Policy Institute, The American Prospect, and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network steering committee, and a former Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.
