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"Jacob Hacker, a Yale University political scientist, has emerged as an incisive voice on issues relating to retirement security and income volatility." - AARP Bulletin
"Jacob Hacker's research on the uneven state of the American safety net has made the young Yale University political scientist a top idea merchant to Democratic think tanks." - Business Week
"Thoughtful Democrats like Clinton aide Gene Sperling and Yale professor Jacob Hacker have argued that Americans, even amid prosperity, are increasingly insecure in our globalized economy and wary of downside risks if they have to change jobs or learn new skills." - Michael Barone, Washington Times
"Hacker's biggest idea to combat volatility: Smooth out the financial ups and downs through 'universal insurance' that would temporarily make up income shortfalls from job losses. Don't be surprised to see a variation on this and other Hacker ideas batted around during the 2008 presidential race." - U.S. News & World Report
"As Jacob Hacker argues persuasively in The Great Risk Shift , America's middle class finds itself living with far more risk and income volatility than it did a generation ago." - Christopher Hayes, The Nation
"Hacker's important and illuminating bookwith its call for creating an insurance and opportunity societyshould inform every discussion of progressive political strategy in the coming decade." - David Moberg, In These Times
"Jacob S. Hacker, a 35-year-old political science professor at Yale, has become something of an intellectual 'It boy' in the Democratic Party over the last decade...The patchwork safety net created in the decades after World War II truly is shriveling, and there will be rewards for the party that comes up with a convincing solution. Hacker has done the Democrats a favor by developing a story and a catchphrasethe great risk shiftto describe the problem." - David Leonhardt, New York Times
"In cutting-edge polemics like Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift , the smartest liberal voices are focusing on voter anxiety about health care and income volatilityanxiety that the GOP hasn't even begun to find a way to address." - Ross Douthat & Reihan Salam, The Weekly Standard
"Democrats don't really have an answer to the economic anxieties of the middle class. They don't quite know how to deal with the complicated mix of optimism and anxiety that characterizes even the upper-middle class in today's economy. They know that the old language of economic security from risk doesn't stand up against the slogans of opportunity and ownership that the right offers, even though those you're-on-your-own policies make matters worse. There is a healthy debate going on in liberal intellectual circles about this. The best answer so far can be found in Jacob Hacker's new book, The Great Risk Shift , in which he proposes that we think of security as the basis for economic opportunity. However, this idea doesn't yet seem to have entered the consciousness of the political class."
- Washington Monthly
"The essential policy book of the year." - E.J. Dionne, Washington Post
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