By Dan Kervick
There is a new Washington think tank on the scene. Well, actually it is just a spinoff and re-branding of an older Washington think tank: the Center for American Progress. The new think tank is called the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Here is the organization’s self-description:
The Washington Center for Equitable Growth is a new research and grantmaking organization founded to accelerate cutting-edge analysis into whether and how structural changes in the U.S. economy, particularly related to economic inequality, affect growth. Core to our mission is helping to build a stronger bridge between academics and policymakers so that new research is relevant, accessible, and informative to the policymaking process.
And here are the people involved with the project on its steering committee, advisory board and staff. There are a handful of interesting folks in the lineup, including Heather Boushey, Nancy Folbre and Emmanuel Saez, economists who have an authentic, well-established research interest in issues of economic inequality. But the crew also contains a lot of Clinton and Obama administration veterans who, quite frankly, have been a giant part of the problem, and helped lay the foundations for the repulsive and dehumanizing economic order under which we currently live. And the organization is headed by John Podesta, the ultimate beltway insider.
