Distinguished Public Policy Lectures
For more than 20 years, IPR’s Distinguished Public Policy Lectures have been a forum for preeminent thinkers to discuss the most relevant policy topics facing their time. Lecturers hail from either the academic or policy worlds, but tend to have experience in both.
Upcoming Events
2023
Raj Chetty: "Creating Equality of Opportunity in America: New Insights from Big Data"
Raj Chetty, the William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics and Director of Opportunity Insights at Harvard University
2022
Raphael Bostic: "Staying Resolute in the Battle Against Inflation"
Raphael Bostic, president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, spoke on "Staying Resolute in the Battle Against Inflation."
2019
Janet Currie: "Child Health as Human Capital"
Janet Currie, Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and Co-Director of Princeton's Center for Health and Wellbeing spoke on the importance of children’s health, both mental and physical, to their long-term academic and labor outcomes.
Matthew Desmond: "Evictions in America"
Matthew Desmond, the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and author of the Pulitzer Prize winner Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, shared as part of the IPR@50 conference some of the latest results from his Eviction Lab, which created the first-ever national database of eviction records.
Jocelyn Samuels: "LGBT Rights: Threats and Opportunities"
Jocelyn Samuels, the executive director of the LGBT-focused Williams Institute at UCLA’s School of Law, spoke about how social science research can have an impact on LGBT health and policy issues.
2018
Arthur C. Brooks: "Reuniting America in a Time of Extreme Polarization"
Arthur C. Brooks, former president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, discussed how political polarization threatens not only the public discourse but America’s social fabric.
Fay Lomax Cook: "The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier"
Fay Lomax Cook, then-assistant director of the National Science Foundation and IPR fellow and former director, spoke about the NSF’s “10 Big Ideas” regarding the future of work in America, including dealing with data collection, climate change, and advances in genetic science.
2017
Kathryn Edin: "Beyond $2 a Day: Solutions for Breaking the Cycle of Extreme Poverty"
In her book, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, sociologist Kathryn Edin illuminates a troubling trend: a low-wage labor market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but hidden landscape of survival strategies among America's extreme poor.
Read the IPR story about this event or watch a video of the talk.