American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper
Paul Pierson is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Pierson’s teaching and research includes the fields of American politics and public policy, comparative political economy, and social theory. His commentary on national affairs has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Review of Books. His most recent books are American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (Simon and Schuster, 2016) and Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (Simon and Schuster, 2010), both co-authored by Jacob Hacker of Yale University.
A prolific writer, Pierson's other recent books include Off-Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (Yale University Press, 2005), with Jacob Hacker; Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis (Princeton University Press, 2004), and The Transformation of American Politics: Activist Government and the Rise of Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2007), co-edited with Theda Skocpol. Pierson is also the author of Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment (Cambridge 1994), which won the American Political Science Association's 1995 prize for the best book on American national politics. His article Path Dependence, Increasing Returns and the Study of Politics won the APSA’s prize for the best article in the American Political Science Review in 2000, as well as the Aaron Wildavsky Prize for its enduring contribution to the field of public policy in 2011. He has served on the editorial boards of The American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, and The Annual Review of Political Science. From 2007 to 2010 he served as chair of U.C. Berkeley's political science department.
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