in government from Oberlin College in 1981 and then attended graduate school at Yale University, completing an M.A.

Pierson's first book, Dismantling the Welfare State?, was a revision of his doctoral dissertation and won the American Political Science Association's Kammerer Prize for the best work on American national politics published in 1994.

Jacob Hacker described the book as "pathbreaking" and as the start of a substantial scholarly literature on welfare state retrenchment.

[2] The book finds that social policy programs in the United States are resilient to fundamental change.

They authored American Amnesia in 2016, which argues for the restoration and reinvigoration of the United States' mixed economy.