Building a Clean, Equitable Economy: Where Do We Go from Here?

Heather Boushey is a professor of practice at Kleinman Center. Boushey is one of the nation’s most influential voices on economic policy and a leading economist who focuses on the intersection between economic inequality, growth, and public policy. She served in the Biden administration as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist to the President’s Investing in America Cabinet. She is also a non-resident fellow at the Reimagining the Economy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School. Boushey co-founded the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and served as the President & CEO and a Steering Committee member from its launch in 2013 until she joined the Biden-Harris Transition Team in 2020. Her latest book, Unbound: How Economic Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It (Harvard University Press), which was called “outstanding” and “piercing” by reviewers, was on the Financial Times list of best economics books of 2019. She is also the author of Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict, and co-edited a volume of 22 essays about how to integrate inequality into economic thinking called After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality.

The New York Times has said that Boushey “is at the forefront of a generation of economists rethinking their discipline” and called her one of the “most vibrant voices in the field.” Politico twice named her one of the top 50 “thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics.” Boushey writes regularly for popular media, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Democracy Journal, and she makes frequent television appearances on Bloomberg, MSNBC, CNBC, and PBS. She previously served as chief economist for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential transition team and as an economist for the Center for American Progress, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the Economic Policy Institute.

Sanya Carley is the Mark Alan Hughes Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center. She is also Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action at the University of Pennsylvania and Presidential Distinguished Professor of Energy Policy and City Planning at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Carley holds secondary appointments at the Wharton School and the School of Social Policy and Practice. She also co-directs the Energy Justice Lab and is a Resources for the Future (RFF) university fellow.

Carley’s research focuses on energy justice and just transitions, energy insecurity, electricity and transportation markets, and public perceptions of energy infrastructure and technologies. With the Energy Justice Lab team, she built and maintains the Utility Disconnection Dashboard. Carley is an author of the Fifth National Climate Assessment report and a member of the Innovation Policy Forum and the Roundtable on Macroeconomics and Climate-related Risks and Opportunities, respectively, for the National Academies.

Prior to her appointment at Penn, Carley was a Paul H. O’Neill Professor at Indiana University, and held administrative positions there as a Chair, Program Director of the top-ranked Master of Public Affairs program, and as Associate Vice Provost of Faculty & Academic Affairs. Before academia, she worked at the World Bank Group as a consultant.

Carley received her Ph.D. in public policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, her M.S. in urban and regional planning from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and bachelor’s degrees in economics and sustainable development from Swarthmore College.