Speaker biographies
Jodie T. Allen is a senior editor at the Pew Research Center. Before joining Pew, Ms. Allen was a managing editor and the business editor for U.S. News & World Report, and she also wrote a biweekly column on political economy. She came to U.S. News from Slate magazine, where she was the Washington bureau chief. Prior to joining Slate, she was the editor of Outlook, the Sunday commentary section of the Washington Post, where she has also been an editorial writer and a business columnist.
Douglas J. Besharov is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and the Joseph J. and Violet Jacobs Scholar in Social Welfare Studies at AEI. Between 1975 and 1979, he was the first director of the U.S. National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. He has written or edited over a dozen books, including Family and Child Well-Being after Welfare Reform (Transaction, 2008), Legal Services for the Poor: Time for Reform (AEI Press, 1990), The Vulnerable Social Worker: Liability for Serving Children and Families (National Association of Social Workers, 1985), and Juvenile Justice Advocacy: Practice in a Unique Court (Practicing Law Institute, 1974). He has written over 250 articles and has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times.
Richard Burkhauser is a visiting scholar at AEI and the Sarah Gibson Blanding Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. His professional career has focused on how public policies affect the economic behavior and well-being of vulnerable populations, such as older persons, people with disabilities, and low-skilled workers. He has published widely on these topics in journals of demography, economics, gerontology, and public policy. As co-principal investigator of the Center for Economic Research on Employment Policy for Persons with Disabilities and the Center on Disability Demographics and Statistics, he provides technical assistance and presentations for government agencies, policymakers, and consumers on the employment and economic well-being of people with disabilities. He has been a member of the Ticket to Work/Work Incentives Improvement Act Advisory Panel, 2000–2002; the technical panel on assumptions and methods of the Social Security actuaries, 2002–2003; and the Social Security advisory board panel on a new definition of eligibility for disability benefits, 2006.
Stephen Rose, of Rose Economic Consulting, is a nationally-recognized labor economist who has been doing innovative research and writing about social class in America for the last thirty years. He has specialized in making information accessible to policymakers and the public at large. Mr. Rose’s book, Social Stratification in the United States, originally published in 1978, is now in its sixth edition. He has worked for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress as an adviser to former secretary of labor Robert Reich and at various research organizations in Washington, D.C. He is currently working on a book, Mythonomics: Ten Things That You Think You Know about Economics That Are Wrong.
Speaker biographies
