Frank Ackerman (1946–) is a senior economist at Synapse Energy Economics in Cambridge, MA, known for his work on environmental economics. He is the author of Can We Afford the Future? Economics for a Warming World and is co-founder of Dollars and Sense magazine.
Nancy Altman (1950–) is a lawyer and co-director of Social Security Works, who taught at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in the 1980s and served as Alan Greenspan’s assistant when he chaired the National Commission on Social Security Reform that developed the 1983 Social Security amendments.
Moshe Adler (1948–) teaches economics at Columbia University and the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Center for Labor Studies at Empire State College. He is the author of Economics for the Rest of Us (The New Press, 2010).
Jared Bernstein (1955–) is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. From 2009 to 2011, Bernstein was the chief economist and economic adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden in the Obama administration.
Stephen Bezruchka (1943–) is with the faculty of the Departments of Health Services and Global Health at the University of Washington. He worked as an emergency physician for thirty years and has spent much of his career studying and teaching about social and economic determinants of health.
Kim Bobo (1954–) is the founding executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice in Chicago. The Utne Reader listed her as one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”
Olveen Carrasquillo (1967–) is chief of the internal medicine division and an assistant professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
Chuck Collins (1959–) is a co-founder of United for a Fair Economy and Responsible Wealth.
Donna Cooper (1958–) is a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress.
Linda Darling-Hammond (1951–) is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and the author of more than a dozen books on education policy and practice. She was an adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
Neil deMause (1965–) is the contributing economics editor at City Limits magazine and a contributing writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s magazine Extra! He also runs the sports-stadium news website fieldofschemes.com, as well as co-authoring the book of the same name. For seven years he wrote questions for the board game Trivial Pursuit.
Lisa Dodson (1958–) is a professor of sociology at Boston College. Previously, she was on the faculty at Harvard University and was a policy fellow at the Radcliffe Public Policy Center.
Ernest Drucker (1940–), a licensed clinical psychologist, is professor emeritus in the Family and Social Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, adjunct professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and senior research associate and scholar in residence at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.
Peter Edelman (1938–) is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center with a long history of working on issues of poverty, welfare, juvenile justice, and constitutional law.
Editorial Projects of Education Research Center is the research arm of the nonprofit organization that publishes Education Week.
Barbara Ehrenreich (1941–), who earned her doctoral degree in cellular immunology, is a journalist who worked undercover in low-paid jobs for her widely acclaimed book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
Robert H. Frank (1945–) is a professor of economics at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. His “Economic View” column appears monthly in the New York Times. He is a distinguished senior fellow at Demos.
Leo W. Gerard (1947–) is a Canadian steelworker who first won election in 2001 as president of the United Steelworkers Union, which represents 1.2 million active and retired aluminum, chemical, forestry, glass, paper, refining, rubber, steel, and other industrial workers in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean.
Lisa Heinzerling (1961–) is professor of law at Georgetown University whose specialties include environmental and natural-resources law. She served as senior climate-policy counsel to the Environmental Protection Agency administrator in 2009 and then for eighteen months as associate administrator of EPA’s Office of Policy.
Glenn Howatt (1957–) is the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s computer-assisted reporting editor.
Thomas L. Hungerford (1953–) is an economist at Economic Policy Institute who earned his doctoral in economics at the University of Michigan and for twenty-two years was an economic policy adviser to Congress and executive branch agencies.
Christopher Jencks (1936–) is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has taught at Harvard, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
David Cay Johnston (1948–) is the author of Perfectly Legal, Free Lunch, and The Fine Print, a trilogy based on his Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporting for the New York Times. He now teaches the regulatory and tax law of the ancient world at Syracuse University College of Law and is board president of the 4,800-member Investigative Reporters and Editors.
Eric Kingson (1946–), co-director of Social Security Works, is a professor at Syracuse University’s School of Social Work and was a policy adviser to the National Commission on Social Security Reform and the 1994 Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform.
Paul Krugman (1953–), Princeton University economist and New York Times columnist, won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Robert Kuttner (1943–) is co-founder and co-editor of the American Prospect, “an authoritative magazine of liberal ideas,” who for two decades wrote a column for Business Week. He is also a founder of the Economic Policy Institute and a distinguished senior fellow at Demos, a research institute.
Glenn C. Loury (1948–) is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. He is the author of, among other works, Race, Incarceration, and American Values: The Tanner Lectures.
Barack Obama (1961–) is the forty-fourth president of the United States. He was the junior senator from Illinois and an Illinois state senator. He attended Occidental College in Los Angeles and graduated from Columbia University. At Harvard Law School he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review, widely regarded as the most eminent position for any law student in America.
Mary E. O’Brien (1952–) is a primary-care internist at Columbia University Health Services and a faculty member at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. She is on the board of the New York metro chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program.
Stephen Pimpare (1965–) has taught American politics, public policy, and the history of social work and social welfare at Columbia University, New York University, the City University of New York, and Yeshiva University.
sean f. reardon (1964–) is a professor at Stanford University whose research examines the patterns and trends in racial and socioeconomic inequality in American education.
Gary Rivlin (1958–) is a former New York Times reporter and the author of five books, including BROKE, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.—How the Working Poor Became Big Business (Harper Business, 2010).
Mike Rose (1944–) is on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and is the author of a number of books about education, work, and social class including The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker.
Chris Serres (1970–) was an investigative reporter covering business for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who now works for the union UNITE HERE, which represents culinary, hotel, and casino workers.
Elizabeth Setren (1988–) is an assistant economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Donald S. Shepard (1947–), an internationally respected health economist, is a professor at the Heller School, Brandeis University.
Beth Shulman (1949–2010) was a Washington labor consultant and former vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, who was co-chair of the Fairness Initiative on Low-Wage Work and a senior fellow at Demos. She died in 2010 at age sixty.
Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher who was the first to figure out market economics. He is known as the father of capitalism and of modern economics. His books include An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Joseph E. Stiglitz (1943–), a 2001 Nobel laureate in economics, is a professor at Columbia University. He is a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist for the World Bank, whose books include The Price of Inequality.
Studs Terkel (1912–2008) was an author, radio broadcaster, and historian best known for his oral histories of ordinary Americans. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for his book The Good War.
Jaime Torres (1957–) founded Latinos for National Health Insurance, which advocates for single-payer lifelong health insurance for every person living in the United States.
Elizabeth Warren (1949–) is the senior United States senator from Massachusetts. Before her election in 2012, she was the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and was widely regarded as America’s leading authority on individual bankruptcy.
Richard Wilkinson (1943–) is professor emeritus of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, honorary professor of epidemiology and public health at University College, London, and visiting professor at University of York.
Edward N. Wolff (1946–) is a professor of economics at New York University known for his work on the concentration of economic gains at the top. He is the author of thirteen books, including Top Heavy, a study of increasing inequality first published in 1995.
Felice Yeskel (1953–2011) founded the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts.