Jacob Hacker is New ISPS Director

As of July 1, 2011, Jacob Hacker is the new director of ISPS. Jacob S. Hacker, Ph.D., is the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University. An expert on the politics of U.S. health and social policy, he is author of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, with Paul Pierson (September 2010; paperback March 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 two volumes—most recently, Health At Risk: America’s Ailing Health System and How to Heal It (2008). Professor Hacker’s scholarly articles have appeared in such outlets as The American Political Science Review, The British Journal of Political Science, Health Affairs, The New England Journal of Medicine, Perspectives on Politics; Politics & Society, Studies in American Political Development, and The Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law. 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 2001 proposal for universal health care (re-issued in 2007 as “Health Care for America”) that became a template for several presidential aspirants’ plans, as well as of three recent briefs on how and why to encourage private health insurance to compete with a new public health plan for the nonelderly. Most recently, with grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he has developed a new index of economic security, the ESI (www.economicsecurityindex.org), and is overseeing a new public opinion survey on perceptions of economic insecurity in the United States. In addition, he oversees a Social Science Research Council project on the “privatization of risk” and is Vice-President of the National Academy of Social Insurance. Professor Hacker received his B.A. from Harvard in 1994, and Ph.D. from Yale in 2000. From 1999 through 2002, he was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.