On Wednesday, November 11, at 4:30pm, the Buckley Institute will welcome AEI's Andrew Biggs and Yale University's Samuel Moyn for a Firing Line debate on the resolution, "Social Security Should Prioritize Poverty Prevention Rather than Benefit Expansion."
Social Security faces long-term fiscal challenges, raising fundamental questions about what the program should aim to provide and how it should be financed. Should Social Security focus on poverty prevention and retirement security for those most in need? Or should benefits be maintained and expanded through higher taxes?
Join the Buckley Institute for what promises to be an important and informative debate.
Andrew G. Biggs is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies Social Security reform, state and local government pensions, and public-sector pay and benefits. Before joining AEI, Dr. Biggs served as principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA), where he oversaw policy research, and as an associate director of the White House National Economic Council, where he worked on Social Security reform. He has testified before Congress and published widely in academic journals and news outlets, including
The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal, and
The Washington Post. In 2014,
Institutional Investor magazine named him one of the 40 most influential people in the retirement world. He is the author of the recent book
The Real Retirement Crisis: Why (Almost) Everything You Know About the US Retirement System Is Wrong (AEI Press, 2025). In 2016, President Obama appointed him to the financial control board overseeing Puerto Rico's fiscal reforms and debt restructuring. Dr. Biggs holds a BA from Queen's University Belfast, master's degrees from Cambridge University and the University of London, and a PhD in government from the London School of Economics.
Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, where he also serves as head of Grace Hopper College. Trained in modern European intellectual history, he works on political and legal thought in modern times and on constitutional and international law in historical and current perspective. He is the author of multiple books, including
Liberalism Against Itself (Yale University Press, 2023),
Humane (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021),
Not Enough (Harvard University Press, 2018),
Christian Human Rights (Penn Press, 2015), and
The Last Utopia (Harvard University Press, 2010). His latest book is
Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth--and What to Do About It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026). Professor Moyn is also a fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Over the years, he has written in venues such as
The Atlantic,
Boston Review,
The Chronicle of Higher Education,
The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal, and more. He earned his bachelor's from Washington University in St. Louis, his PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and his JD from Harvard Law School.
