Clifford Cobb

[2002]

Clifford Cobb has served as interim Executive Director of the Schalkenbach Foundation, President of the Foundation's board of trustees and as Program Director.

Mr. Cobb grew up in California, where he also attended college (University of the Pacific) and the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. After a few years working in Washington, D.C., where he discovered a great moral and intellectual vacuum, he set off for Asia. He taught English in Japan for two years, then traveled in the rest of Asia for one year. Upon returning to the U.S., he entered seminary with the intention of working toward a doctorate in social ethics, but he quit after three years of part-time study.

In the late 1980s, he published, in the book For the Common Good by Herman Daly and John Cobb, a measure called the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW). He and John Cobb separately published The Green National Product, which includes an early and later version of the ISEW, along with critiques by various scholars. In the early 1990s, he became the director of the Institute for Educational Choice and wrote Responsive Schools, Renewed Communities, a communitarian defense of educational vouchers.

In 1994, Mr. Cobb joined the staff of a fledgling San Francisco think-tank called Redefining Progress, which re-published a modified form of the ISEW, calling it the Genuine Progress Indicator. Along with Jonathan Rowe and Ted Halstead, he published a major article in the Atlantic Monthly in October 1995. For Redefining Progress, he also contributed to or wrote articles or short books on the potential impacts of a gasoline tax, analyses of a tax shift (from taxes on wages to taxes on resource use) at the national and state levels, threats to the national statistical system, and the history of social indicators.

Mr. Cobb is the director of the Henry George School in Sacramento, California and a Senior Fellow at Redefining Progress. He is doing research on the origins of the social sciences in the late nineteenth century and how the resolutions reached during that period have constrained in unproductive ways the instruments of social reform that are taken seriously in academic and activist circles.