Welcome

I’ve had good humanistic, journalistic, and social scientific educations and careers, and have published a diverse collection of my writing, but for most of my professional life I’ve done two things. First as a professor in New York and Texas, I explored how communication works to make social advocacy groups credible (and what makes them lose and sometimes regain credibility). Then as a policy researcher, I created Texas’ first index of economic in/security for different types of people and families that could better reflect the reality of their financial pressures than the blunt, 1960s-era poverty measure that still shadows over so many needy lives.

There’s a lot of impressive work on both these topics—writing, data, and visual media. Yet I believe they’re still, not yet, fully combined in ways that might better speak to the daily experience of thoughtful non-experts from all places in life. I think of my current writing as my side of a long lunch conversation with a smart friend that reflects what we’ve been through, but, crucially, also explores causes and solutions, and not just for ourselves. On this site I’ll be shifting back and forth between personal and political because of course they’re interconnected. The potential of my kind of synthesis inspired the name of the website POLICY studio+lab. Communication–through all its means–is fundamental, economics—if thought of not technically, but just humanely, as who-has-what and who doesn’t, and why, and whether it’s OK—is fundamental. Bringing the two together, in my observation and writing now, is my theme.