About

I’m Will Wilkinson, a Research Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. I work on an array of issues, from Social Security to the policy implications of happiness research to the nature of economic inequality and mobility. I also edit Cato’s monthly web magazine Cato Unbound. I’ve written for Reason, Forbes, the Philadephia Inquirer, The Economist, Slate, Policy, Prospect, and a variety of other publication online and off. I have been a regular writer for The Economist’s Free Exchange economics blog, I appear every other week on American Public Media’s Marketplace, and every week on my Bloggingheads TV show, Free Will.

Before joining Cato, I was Academic Coordinator of the Social Change Project and the Global Prosperity Initiative at The Mercatus Center at George Mason University. For three years I ran the Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students for The Institute for Humane Studies, where I was also a Program Director involved in academic programs.

I graduated in 1995 from the University of Northern Iowa with a B.A. in the Humanities (Philosophy and History of Art) and in Studio Art (Painting), and again in 1998 from Northern Illinois University with an M.A. in Philosophy. For about six years, on and off, I was a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at the University of Maryland, where my emphasis was philosophy of mind and language and then, later, political philosophy.

I was born in Independence, Missouri in 1973. I grew up happily in Marshalltown, Iowa. My father, James Wilkinson, now retired from his duties as Chief of the Council Bluffs, Iowa police department, resides with my step-mom, Pat, in Omaha. My mother, Dorothy Wilkinson, died in 1989. She was a nurse. I have two sisters, Suzanne and Jennifer, who live Warrensburg, Missouri and Moscow, Idaho, respectively. My grandmother, Jessie Graffeo, of Independence, Missouri, is especially dear to me.

I live in Iowa City, Iowa, where my partner, Kerry Howley, attends the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program.