Nate Hilger
Silicon Valley Economist and Data Scientist, Brown University Professor
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Nate Hilger
Biography
Nate Hilger is a researcher and writer. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford University and a PhD in economics from Harvard University.
He has worked as a professor of economics at Brown University and an economist and data scientist in Silicon Valley. While in academia he was a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and continues to hold an affiliation with the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown. In 2020 he served as a lead policy consultant on early childhood and non-K12 child development issues for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.
He has won grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, and the Kauffman Foundation, and given talks at universities and research institutes around the world. He has made formative contributions to the IRS Databank and the Stripe-Stanford Survey of Internet Entrepreneurship.
His academic research on child development and inequality has been published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics and other leading peer-reviewed journals, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major media outlets. He lives with his wife and son in Redwood City, California.
Nate Hilger
Featured Video
Current: The Parent Trap - What's the Trap?
Time 04:49
Nate Hilger
Featured Keynote Programs
The Economic Argument for Familycare
With growing evidence of the importance of childhood education and health on long-term economic outcomes, is it time for the United States to implement a New Deal scale program in support of families? In this talk, Nate Hilger describes what such a program—call it “Familycare”—would encompass and how it would level the economic playing field. He then walks us through a hypothetical family experience with and without Familycare, focusing on a range of social and economic outcomes such as crime, teen pregnancy, education, income, and health.
• How childhood opportunities impact long-term outcomes.
• Why it’s not possible for most families to provide key opportunities on their own.
• What a program like Familycare should cover and how it would create change.
• What it will take to get a program like Familycare enacted and sustained.
Big Government for Kids, Small Government for Grown Ups
Is there any room for major bipartisan agreement in America? Liberals fight to protect and expand government programs, while Conservatives fight to eliminate and downsize them. Hilger’s counterintuitive proposal for a “grand bargain”—a larger government for children alongside a smaller government for adults—produces a bipartisan bonanza through improvements in poverty, inequality, health, and economic growth, higher rates of employment, marriage, two-parent family formation, and less overall reliance on government support programs.
• Why big government for kids makes more sense than big government for adults.
• Why both fiscal and social conservatives should embrace a larger government for kids.
• What a bigger government for kids should do and how it would create change.
Parenting in the 21st Century
Policy, Politics, and Culture
There are more than 60 million parents living with children under 18 in the United States. If they were an organized political bloc, they would represent a third of the voting public. Yet, they have no national advocacy group, their work as parents is taken for granted, and public programs to support families perennially fail in Washington. In this talk, Nate Hilger offers bold solutions to improve the state of parenting in three ways—with policy by implementing a New Deal scale program called Familycare; with politics by organizing an advocacy group modeled on the AARP for parents; and with culture by elevating and prioritizing child development and “care” as complicated, high-impact work warranting major public support.
• Why families have too little political power and how we can address this problem.
• What we lose when our government fails to serve families as well as it serves other political interest groups.
• What a major new public program like Familycare should cover and how it would create generational changes appealing to both Liberals and Conservatives.
Nate Hilger
Featured Book
The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis
by Nate Hilger
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