Steven Hill is a political writer, columnist, and lecturer with two decades of experience in public policy. A co-founder of FairVote/Center for Voting and Democracy and former director of the political reform program at the New America Foundation, he is widely known for his advocacy of proportional representation, public financing of election campaigns, and the president’s election by national popular vote. Hill’s op-eds and articles have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Politico, Financial Times, Guardian, Le Monde, Die Zeit, IP Journal, and on Al Jazeera. He is the author of four books, among them Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way Is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age (2010) and Fixing Elections: The Failure of America’s Winner Take All Politics (2003).
As a spring 2016 fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Hill will work on his project “Troubled Future: How the Sharing Economy and Freelance Society are Threatening Workers’ Livelihoods, and What We Can Do About It.” In the US, he explains, the sharing economy is accelerating toward a “freelance society,” wherein tens of millions of workers will find themselves with no regular jobs or steady work, lower pay, and a weaker safety net. Hill asks if the sharing economy might work better in a place like Germany, where the welfare state is more developed and a stronger tradition of labor unions and government regulation has fostered more broadly shared prosperity.
A close observer of political institutions and practices in Europe since the 1990s, Hill will propose policy-based solutions and reforms that would encourage American economic policymakers to adapt to this new reality.
