Lew Daly

Lew Daly is a Director of the Sustainable Progress Initiative and a Senior Fellow at Demos. He currently leads Demos’s Beyond GDP project, a multi-year campaign to advance alternative indicators of well-being and sustainability in federal and state-level governance in the United States. He is the author (with Stephen Posner) of Beyond GDP: New Measures for a New Economy. A companion report, What is Our Public GDP? Measuring and Valuing Government in the Twenty-First Century Economy, is forthcoming in 2013. Lew works internationally as a member of Global Well-Being and GNH Lab and as an advisor to the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation in South Africa.

In addition to his program work, Lew writes on religion, 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 religion and social policy 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, Boston Review, Commonweal, Dissent, Tikkun, and many other publications. His work has been covered in The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Bloomberg News, The Weekly Standard, The Christian Century, Commonweal, National Catholic Reporter, and the Nation, among other publications. 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 chief 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, and he was a research fellow of the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland from 2002-2005. 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. With his wife Pam Rehm and their children Nate and Cora, he lives in the West Harlem neighborhood of upper Manhattan