Christian E. Weller is a senior fellow at American Progress and a professor of public policy at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His area of expertise includes retirement income security, macroeconomics, money and banking, and international finance. He is also a research scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute and an institute fellow at the University of Massachusetts Boston’s Gerontology Institute. Prior to joining the Center, he was on the research staff at the Economic Policy Institute, where he remains a research associate.
Christian has also worked at the Center for European Integration Studies at the University of Bonn in Germany; under the Department of Public Policy of the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.; and served in the banking sector in Germany, Belgium, and Poland. He is a respected academic with more than 100 academic and popular publications. His academic publications have appeared in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Development Studies, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Aging and Social Policy, and the Journal of Economic Issues, among others. His popular writings have been published in The New York Times, USA Today, and The Atlanta Journal Constitution.
He co-authored with E. Wolff the book, Retirement Income: The Crucial Role of Social Security and was a co-editor of Employee Pensions: Policies, Problems and Possibilities with T. Ghilarducci. In 2006, he was awarded the Outstanding Scholar-Practitioner Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association. In 2007, Christian was elected to the board of the Labor and Employment Relations Association, one of the country’s largest associations for professionals in the fields of labor and employment relations.
His work is frequently cited in the press and he is often a guest on national TV and radio programs. Christian holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Power within corporations has shifted away from Main Street in favor of Wall Street, but collective bargaining, competition, tax fairness, and corporate long-termism can help American capitalism do better.
Most policy interventions, even those that are seemingly large or ambitious, are insufficient to close the racial wealth gap.
Making smarter investments than in the past can create a stronger economy and healthier middle class.
Despite working as much or more than white families, Latinx families have less wealth.
Union membership increases wealth for all workers and does the most for nonwhite families.
Millions of American families are living on the edge, increasingly suffering from volatile incomes, unstable jobs and low wealth.
The already large racial wealth gap between white and black American households grew even wider after the Great Recession. Targeted policies are necessary to reverse this deepening divide.
Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations will result in more inequality and larger deficits instead of faster growth and more jobs.
The economy and the labor market experienced long periods of stable growth during Barack Obama’s presidency, laying the foundation to address remaining issues in the Trump administration.
Women face more hard-to-avoid risks than men, especially from caregiving, that can lower their savings and leave them economically vulnerable.
