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Lew Daly
ldaly@demos.org

 

Lew Daly is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Sustainable Progress Initiative at Demos. He manages a portfolio of projects focusing on new economic thinking for sustainable growth and social progress, including the development and implementation of “Beyond GDP” metrics in federal and state-level governance, and new economic models and policy development for a post-consumerist America.

In addition to his program work, Lew writes on religion and ethics, economic policy, and welfare state development. His recent books include (with Gar Alperovitz) Unjust Deserts: How the Rich are Taking our Common Inheritance (The New Press, 2008), which proposes a new theory of distributive justice for the era of the knowledge economy, and God's Economy: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State (University of Chicago Press, 2009), a comparative study of church-state law and welfare governance in Europe and the United States. He is also the author of God and the Welfare State (The MIT Press, 2006), and has published articles, reviews, and commentary in many publications, including Newsweek, Democracy, Policy Review, Commonweal, Boston Review, Dissent, Tikkun, and many other publications. His work has been covered in The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Weekly Standard, The Christian Century, Commonweal, and The Nation, among others. Lew is a frequent guest on radio programs, a guest contributor at Front Porch Republic, co-editor of a series of on-line forums with The Democratic Strategist, and an editorial consultant to the Economic Crisis Study Team of the Presbyterian Church USA.   

Lew was previously a fellow of the Schumann Center for Media & Democracy, where he worked closely with then-president Bill Moyers on special projects. He formerly worked as a research consultant with the Democracy Collaborative of the University of Maryland, and as a researcher and strategist on religious advocacy. In the mid-1990s, he did pastoral work in a federal prison as well as community organizing on labor issues. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College and advanced degrees from Brown University, the University at Buffalo, and Union Theological Seminary.

 

Contributions

Growth does not equal progress: Why GDP is (increasingly) obsolete
COMMENTARY | February 21, 2012
Gross Domestic Product badly overstates the benefits of unequal growth and understates the value of intangibles, writes an advocate of alternative measurements. As a result, journalists should stop granting it talismanic significance in defining the nation's progress.


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