Scott Winship

Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at American Enterprise Institute
Scott Winship was basically a one-man FREOPP before FREOPP came to be.
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Scott Winship was basically a one-man FREOPP before FREOPP came to be.

Scott grew up in a small town in central Maine — population 6,735 — “where diversity means Protestants and Catholics!” He moved west to study Sociology and Urban Studies at Northwestern, motivated by the 1992 Rodney King riots and a desire to study urban poverty and civil rights. After Northwestern, Scott joined the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN, where he got into arguments with his bosses about the economic effects of raising the minimum wage.

While working on a Ph.D. in Social Policy at Harvard, Winship took time off to serve as Managing Editor of The Democratic Strategist, a website founded by political scientist Ruy Teixeira. This was followed by stops at Third Way, a centrist think tank; the Pew Charitable Trusts, where he managed Pew’s Economic Mobility Project; the Brookings Institution; and the Manhattan Institute.

Scott joined FREOPP in 2016 as its first policy scholar, where he continued his work on the causes and effects of poverty and social mobility. “There are a lot of problems that the poor face, in particular inadequate upward mobility, that deserve our attention as a society,” Scott told the Washington Free Beacon in 2013. But Scott hasn’t been satisfied with those who respond to the issue with 1930s-vintage policies.

From 2017 to 2020, Scott ran the Social Capital Project at the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, where, as Annie Lowrey put it in The Atlantic, Scott and his colleagues attempt to study “the social fabric like economists [study] GDP.” Today, he serves on FREOPP’s Board of Advisors, and as Director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute.

“I’m thrilled to be involved in FREOPP, which will become the premier source of innovative, market-friendly ideas to expand opportunity for the truly disadvantaged,” says Scott. “Increasing poor kids’ upward mobility can — and must — be a goal of people of all parties and philosophies, and FREOPP is poised to lead the way out of the stale policy debates of the past.”

Scott lives with his wife, Monique, and his daughter in Washington, D.C.