American political scientist, Stanley Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale and director of Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies; with his longtime collaborator Paul Pierson, the most influential contemporary analyst of how American political institutions have been reshaped to produce and protect extreme economic inequality. Where economists tend to study inequality as an outcome of market forces, Hacker's central contribution has been to insist that the American distribution of income and risk is an actively produced political result — built by organized interests, through identifiable policy choices, sustained over decades.
His 2006 book The Great Risk Shift traced how economic risks (of job loss, health emergencies, retirement shortfall) that had been pooled at the level of the firm, the union, or the state through the postwar period were systematically shifted back onto individual households from the 1970s onward, while the language of "personal responsibility" made the shift appear natural rather than chosen. Winner-Take-All Politics (2010, with Pierson) gave the argument broader historical scope, documenting how the American political system — through both parties, through what governments chose to do and chose not to do — rewrote the rules in favor of the top 0.1 percent over a generation, with organized business and a transformed Republican Party as the primary agents. American Amnesia (2016, with Pierson) recovered the mid-century "mixed economy" as the political achievement that delivered American prosperity, and argued that its dismantling is the underappreciated source of contemporary discontent. Let Them Eat Tweets (2020, with Pierson) analyzed what they called "plutocratic populism" — the alliance between a plutocratic economic agenda unpopular on its merits and an ethno-nationalist political mobilization that distracts from it.
Hacker is also the originator of the "public option" proposal in American health-care debates (his 2007 paper Health Care for America supplied the term and the design that the Obama administration briefly adopted). He works, characteristically, at the intersection of serious political-science scholarship and live public-policy argument.