Michael Weinstein, Chief Program Officer, The Robin Hood Foundation

Michael Weinstein, Chief Program Officer, The Robin Hood Foundationhttp://www.haverford.edu/calendar/details/229162Gest Center 1012013-04-16T16:15:002013-04-16T18:00:00

April 16, 4:15PM

Gest Center 101

Description

Friends:

Michael Weinstein, Chief Program Officer at the Robin Hood Foundation, an anti-poverty foundation in NYC, will be speaking at Haverford at 4:15, Tuesday, 16 April, in Gest 101. The Robin Hood Foundation is well-known for its rigorous evaluation of the programs that it supports (see http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/09/18/8386204/) and Weinstein will be speaking about “Who Should Rule 21st Century Philanthropies:  Poets or Economists.”

Weinstain holds a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. and taught economics and was Chair of the Department of Economics at Haverford during much of the 1970s and 1980s. While at Haverford, he was also the economics analyst and commentator for National Public Radio. He left Haverford to join The New York Times, where he served on the editorial board and as the Time’s economics columnist during the 1990s. In 2001, he became the founding director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, while holding the Paul A. Volcker Chair in International Economics at the Council.

Weinstein manages the Institutes for Journalists at The New York Times Company Foundation (which trains journalists in complicated subjects about to hit the headlines).  He is president and founder of W.A.D. Financial Counseling, Inc., a non-profit foundation that provides free financial counseling to poor families. He is co-founder and chairman emeritus of Single Stop U.S.A., a national organization that helps low-income Americans solve financial problems.

Weinstein has written 1,300 or so columns, editorials, news analysis articles and magazine pieces for The New York Times about health care, welfare, energy, social security, tax, budget, trade, inequality, environment, regulation, antitrust, telecommunications, education, banking and many other public policy issues. He co-authored The Democracy Advantage: How Democracies Promote Prosperity and Peace, (Routledge and the Council on Foreign Relations, 2004), edited Globalization: What’s New? (Columbia University Press and the Council on Foreign Relations, 2005) and authored Recovery and Redistribution Under the N.I.R.A. (North Holland, 1980). Columbia University Press will publish this spring his co-authored book, The Robin Hood Rules For Smart Giving.

Weinstein is currently writing an intellectual biography of Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics, and he will begin a syndicated column on public policy for Reuters this winter.

I can attest that Weinstein is a first-rate teacher. He and I taught several courses together, and I attended two of his courses when he was at Haverford. He is concerned primarily to help people learn how to think about public policy questions.

Finally, because of a scheduling faux pas, Weinstein’s talk overlaps with the Department of Economics’s Comanor Lecture, which starts a bit after 5:30. This is especially unfortunate because the Comanor Lecture will be given by Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. I will announce the overlap and indicate that those who would like to leave Weinstein’s talk at 5:30 should feel free to do so (the Comanor Lecture will start late to accommodate folks who leave Gest 101 at 5:30). Please note that Weinstein’s talk will begin at 4:15.

Mark

PS, Weinstein will be attending my “Class, Race and Education” seminar Tuesday at 11:30, Roberts 007 (in the Basement). After that seminar he will be having lunch with interested students at the Coop. Students interested in attending the seminar are welcome to do so. Weinstein recommended two essays for the seminar: his own "Measuring Success" paper is a very early draft of a book that will be published in a few weeks; it outlines how the Robin Hood Foundation operates (https://www.robinhood.org/sites/default/files/2009_Metrics_Book.pdf ). The Meyer-Sullivan paper (Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan, “Winning the War: Poverty from the Great
Society to the Great Recession,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Fall 2012, pp. 133-200) is a discussion that criticizes how we measure poverty and suggests that some progress has been made in alleviating poverty in the US (http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Projects/BPEA/Fall%202012/2012b_Meyer.pdf). If you know of any students who might be interested, please mention these events to them. Thanks.

For More Info

Mark Gould
addr