About Jacob Hacker

Jacob Hacker is a professor of political science at Yale University and the Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He is a co-author of the bestselling book Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. He helped develop 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, and his 2007 plan, Health Care for America, became a template for several presidential candidates’ health care reform proposals. In his latest book, American Amnesia, written with Paul Pierson, he argues that the vital link between business and government has frayed, and along with it, the American tradition of social advancement and prosperity.