Moderator: Paul Pierson, Director, Berkeley Economy & Society Initiative
March 11, 4-5:30 p.m.
Bakar Auditorium, Berkeley Hillel, 2736 Bancroft Way, Berkeley CA 94704
A key engine of economic opportunity in America has stalled. The right to move is under attack and economic mobility is the casualty.
In two urgent new books, Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor at The Atlantic, and Jerusalem Demsas, staff writer at The Atlantic, chronicle the decline of mobility in America. As Appelbaum and Demsas show, many of the policies that keep people in poverty, such as historic segregation, exclusionary land-use, and anti-development obstructionism, have something in common: They don’t let people move where they want to move.
BESI invites you to join us for a candid discussion with these authors on America’s housing crisis and the thwarting of economic opportunity. BESI director Paul Pierson will moderate the conversation, after which an audience Q&A will follow.
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for American Democracy
About the Speakers
Yoni Appelbaum is a deputy executive editor at The Atlantic and the author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Appelbaum is a social and cultural historian of the United States. Before joining The Atlantic, he was a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University. He previously taught at Babson College and at Brandeis University, where he received his Ph.D. in American history.
Jerusalem Demsas is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers housing, democracy, federalism, immigration, and economics. She hosts the podcast “Good on Paper,” in which each week Demsas and a guest take a closer look at the facts and research that challenge the popular narratives of the day to better understand why we believe what we believe. Her new book, On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy, collects key selections of her writing in The Atlantic to offer an accessible guide to this generational crisis.
About the Moderator
Paul Pierson is the John Gross Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. He is the director of the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative and serves as co-director of the Consortium on American Political Economy. His research, which focuses on the American political economy and public policy, has been awarded several major prizes from the American Political Science Association. He is the author or co-author of seven books, including the best-selling Winner Take All Politics, written with Jacob Hacker. His latest book, with Eric Schickler, is Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era.