About the Authors
JACOB S. HACKER is Peter Strauss Family Associate Professor of Political Science, Yale University. He is also a Fellow at the New America Foundation, among other affiliations.
A political scientist who studies health and social policy, Hacker is the author of two books: The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President Clinton's Plan for Health Security, which was co-winner of the 1997 Louis Brownlow Book Award of the National Academy of Public Administration, and The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States. Before coming to Yale, he was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.
A frequent commentator on NPR, PBS, CNN, and CNBC, Hacker has written for the New Republic, The Nation, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and Washington Post, among other publications. He will appear in a documentary, "Divided States," scheduled to aire in November on ABC.
Hacker is currently at work on a book about growing economic insecurity and an edited volumen on the politics of inequality and poverty in the U.S. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
PAUL PIERSON is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Avice Saint Chair in Public Policy. Before taking this position in 2004, he was professor of government at Harvard University, where he taught from 1988 to 2004.
Pierson's first book, Dismantling the Welfare State? won the American Political Science Association's Kammerer Prize for the best book published on American national politics and policy in 1994. He has been the recipient of a number of prestigious fellowships, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence, and a Russell Sage Foundation Fellowship.
Pierson is currently working on two books on long-term changes in the American political system. He lives in Berkeley, California.
