Work and Well-Being in 21st Century America (Human Flourishing)

Date: 

Friday, September 17, 2021, 12:00pm to 4:30pm

Location: 

Online

There has been increasing interest in recent years from sides of the political spectrum in reviving robust and prosperous middle-class American communities. It seems evident that this requires renewed attention to the link between work and well-being, involving both a cultural reorientation and imaginative institutional design.

Statue of Liberty and webinar title

To that end, on the afternoon of September 17th (from 12-2pm and 2:30-4:30pm ET), the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University and the Abigail Adams Institute will be pleased to host a webinar on the theme, "Work and Well-Being in 21st Century America: Promoting Productive & Purposeful Communities."

This event will feature presentations and open-ended dialogue among four distinguished invited speakers (Laurie DeRose, Michael Lind, Matt Stoller, and Russell Hittinger) alongside HFH and AAI staff members. The webinar will approach this problem from multiple vantages, considering both fundamental questions about the proper roles of the state, the market, and civil society in fostering productive pluralism and strong families, and more specific questions about, e.g., the merits of family income-supplement vs. UBI schemes, trade policy and labor arbitrage, or the ongoing realignment of America’s major political parties.

Event registration under this link.

 

Event Schedule

12pm-12:45pm: Russell Hittinger on solidarity, subsidiarity, and well-being.

12:45pm-1:30pm: Laurie DeRose on "workism."

1:30pm-2:00pm: Break

2:00pm-2:45pm: Michael Lind on the "new class war" and renewing democratic pluralism.

2:45-3:30pm: Matt Stoller on economic liberties and monopoly power.

 

Panelists

Erika Bachiochi Erika Bachiochi is a Senior Fellow at Abigail Adams Institute and a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. A legal scholar who specializes in equal protection jurisprudence, feminist legal theory, and Catholic social teaching, she was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School in 2018. Her latest book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, is just out from Notre Dame Press.
Laurie DeRose Laurie DeRose is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of America. Her early research on sub-Saharan African demography laid the foundation for her current focus on global comparative family studies. She is the Director of Research for the Institute for Family Studies’ World Family Map project.
F Russell Hittinger F. Russell Hittinger has served as a member of the Pontifical Academies of the Social Sciences and of Thomas Aquinas. A Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa, he serves as a Visiting Professor at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, part of the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley.
Michael Lind Michael Lind has taught at the University of Texas, Harvard and Johns Hopkins. He has been assistant to the director of the Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs at the U.S. State Department and has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper's, The New Republic and The National Interest. A co-founder of New America, along with Walter Mead, Sherle Schwenninger and Ted Halstead, Lind is the author of more than a dozen books of nonfiction, fiction, poetry and children's literature, including several that were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. His studies of U.S. history, economics and foreign policy include The Next American Nation (1995), The American Way of Strategy (2006), Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (2012) and The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (2020).
Matt Stoller Matt Stoller is the author of the Simon and Schuster book Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project and a visiting lecturer in the Department of History at Columbia University. He writes an email newsletter Big on the politics of market power.
Jeffrey Hanson Jeffrey Hanson is a senior philosopher at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. Dr. Hanson’s research focuses on issues in philosophy of religion, phenomenology, aesthetics, and ethics. His writings on Kierkegaard, French phenomenology of religion, and the arts are motivated by an ongoing interest in the practical value of philosophy for human flourishing, and he draws on the whole history of philosophy and theology for both his scholarly work and popular publications on literature, music, film, and popular culture. His newest book is Philosophies of Work in the Platonic Tradition: A History of Labor and Human Flourishing

Organizers

Brendan W. Case - Associate Director for Research at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Danilo Petranovich - Director of the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.