Jacob Hacker

Bio

Jacob S. Hacker is Stanley Resor Professor of Political Science, Co-Director of the Ludwig Program in Public Sector Leadership at Yale Law School, and a resident fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. An expert on American politics and policy, he is the author or co-author of more than a half-dozen books, numerous journal articles, and a wide range of popular writings. His 2002 book The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (2002) was recently awarded the Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Award of the American Political Science Association, given to a book that has made a lasting contribution to the study of public policy. His latest book, written with Paul Pierson, is Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (2020). A regular policy advisor and expert commentator, Professor Hacker is known for his writings on health policy, especially his development of the so-called public option, as well as for the concept of “predistribution”—the shaping of markets to tackle inequality, rather than redistribution of income after the fact. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he received the Robert Ball Award of the National Academy of Social Science in 2020 and was inducted into the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2021. He is a founding director of the Consortium on American Political Economy (CAPE), established in 2020 with the support of the Hewlett Foundation, and he co-chairs the American Political Economy section of the American Political Science Association since 2022. In the fall of 2022, he was a visiting scholar in Paris at the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo). During the summer of 2022, he was the Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the U.S. Library of Congress.

Contact

115 Prospect Street, Rosenkranz Hall, Room 215
(203)432-5554
jacob.hacker@yale.edu

Education

• B.A., Harvard, 1994
• Ph.D., Yale University, 2000

Associations, Group Affiliations or Memberships

• Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University
• Ludwig Program for Public Leadership
• Consortium on American Political Economy
• Organized Section on American Political Economy, APSA
• Scholars Strategy Network, Connecticut Chapter

Papers

• ” The institutional foundations of middle-class democracy.” Policy Network 6, no. 5 (2011): 33-37.

C.V.

Personal Website

Areas of Interest

• American Politics
• Public Policy
• Inequality