Jacob Hacker is professor of political science and resident fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. He is also a fellow at the New America Foundation and a former junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

His most recent books are The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back and Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (with Paul Pierson), which is newly in paperback.

Currently, Hacker is heading a Social Science Research Council project on the "privatization of risk," cochairing the National Academy of Social Insurance's 2007 conference and completing two books: Inequality and American Politics: Participation, Power and Policy and an edited volume on the politics of inequality and insecurity in the United States (with Joe Soss and Suzanne Mettler). His articles, opinion pieces and interviews have appeared in dozens of magazines, newspapers, scholarly journals and on NPR. He earned his BA from Harvard College and his PhD in political science from Yale University.