For richer, for poorer: How family structures economic success in America

Speaker Biographies

Robert Doar is the Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies at AEI, where he studies and evaluates how free enterprise and improved federal policies and programs can reduce poverty and provide opportunities for vulnerable Americans. Before joining AEI, Doar worked for Mayor Michael Bloomberg as commissioner of New York City’s Human Resources Administration, where he administered 12 public assistance programs, including welfare, food assistance, public health insurance, and help for people living with HIV/AIDS. Before joining the Bloomberg administration, Doar was New York State commissioner of social services, helping make New York a model for the implementation of welfare reform.

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an op-ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of “Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class” (Hyperion, 2005) and the coauthor, with Reihan Salam, of “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream” (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.

Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist and demographer by training, holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI. He is also a senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research, a member of the visiting committee at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a member of the Global Leadership Council at the World Economic Forum. He researches and writes extensively on economic development, foreign aid, global health, demographics, and poverty. He is the author of numerous monographs and articles on North and South Korea, East Asia, and countries of the former Soviet Union. He is the author of “A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic” (Templeton, 2012) and the recently released AEI monograph “The Great Society at Fifty: The Triumph and The Tragedy.”

Elisabeth Jacobs is senior director for policy and academic programs at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Her research focuses on economic inequality and mobility, families’ economic security, poverty, employment, social policy, social insurance, and the politics of inequality. Before joining Equitable Growth, she was a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, cofounder of Brookings’s popular Social Mobility Memos blog, and frequent public commentator on inequality, mobility, and the implications of the Great Recession for American families. Earlier in her career, Jacobs served as senior policy adviser to the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress and as an adviser to the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

Robert Lerman is the Urban Institute’s first Institute Fellow in Labor and Social Policy and is professor of economics at American University. He conducts research and publishes on how education, employment, and family structure work together to affect economic well-being. Lerman was director of the Urban Institute’s Labor and Social Policy Center from 1995 to 2003. In the 1970s, he worked on reforming the nation’s income maintenance programs and on youth employment policies as staff economist for both the congressional Joint Economic Committee and the US Department of Labor.

Aparna Mathur is a resident scholar in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. At AEI, her research has focused on income inequality and mobility, tax policy, labor markets and small businesses. In March of this year, she and coauthor Abby McCloskey published a comprehensive report on how to improve economic mobility in the United States. She has also published in several top scholarly journals, testified several times before Congress, and published numerous articles in the popular press on issues of policy relevance. Her work has been cited in academic journals as well as in leading news magazines such as The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Businessweek. Government organizations such as the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office have also cited her work in their reports to Congress. She has been an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Public Policy and has taught economics at the University of Maryland.

Isabel Sawhill is a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, where she serves as codirector of the Budgeting for National Priorities project and codirector of the Center on Children and Families. In 2009, she began the Social Genome Project, an initiative by the Center on Children and Families that seeks to determine how to increase economic opportunity for disadvantaged children. In addition, she has authored or edited numerous books and articles, including “Creating an opportunity society” (with Ron Haskins, 2009) and “One Percent for the Kids: New Policies, Brighter Futures for America’s Children” (Brookings Institution Press, 2003). Her most recent book is “Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood Without Marriage” (Brookings Institution Press 2014). Sawhill helped found the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and now serves as president of its board.

Michelle Singletary writes the nationally syndicated personal-finance column “The Color of Money,” which appears in The Washington Post and is carried in more than 100 newspapers. In 2010, she released her third personal-finance book, “The Power to Prosper: 21 Days to Financial Freedom” (Zondervan). She has been a personal-finance contributor for MSNBC, NPR, and ABC’s talk show “The Revolution.” For two seasons, she hosted “Singletary Says” on TV One. Singletary is the director of a ministry she founded at her church, in which women and men volunteer to mentor others who are having financial challenges.

Jordan Weissmann is the senior business and economics correspondent at Slate, where, among various and sundry topics, he has written about the rise of inequality, the decline of marriage, and the nature of poverty and class mobility. He was previously a senior associate editor at The Atlantic.

W. Bradford Wilcox is a visiting scholar at AEI. He also directs the National Marriage Project and serves as associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. Before coming to the University of Virginia, he held research fellowships at Princeton University (where he continues to serve as a member of the James Madison Society), Yale University, and the Brookings Institution. His research focuses on marriage, parenthood, and cohabitation and on the ways that gender, religion, and children influence the quality and stability of American marriages and family life. He has published widely about marriage, cohabitation, parenting, and fatherhood in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, and many other media outlets.