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Robert Kuttner

Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, as well as a distinguished senior fellow of the think tank Demos. He was a longtime columnist for Business Week and continues to write columns in The Boston Globe. He is the author of Obama's Challenge and other books.

Recent Articles

Hard Times, Scary Prospects

Robert KuttnerMay 07, 2012

For the first time in the history of the American republic, the far right has captured one of our two major parties. Whether the issue is denial of science, restriction of fundamental rights and liberties, the substitution of big money for the vote, the destruction of the middle class, or the wreckage of even modest social supports, we live in ominous times.

Unfortunately, it is also a precarious time for one of America’s core progressive institutions—this magazine.

As a founding editor of The American Prospect, I have never written a column like this one, and I hope never to write another. 

The Prospect could cease publication if we don’t bridge a serious funding gap.

The Joys of Recession

Robert KuttnerApr 24, 2012
(Flickr/jima)

The Social Security Trustees have just projected that the date by which the system will no longer be able to meet all of its payouts has been moved up three years from 2036 to 2033. This has prompted the usual clucking about the need for drastic benefit cuts of partial privatization right now. 

What nobody seems to have noticed is that the primary reason for the pessimistic forecast is the lousy economy, particularly the high unemployment and depressed wages. Social Security is of course financed by payroll taxes. There’s no better way to put the system into the red than to have a recession and to have 93 percent of the gains to go to the top one percent (whose payroll taxes are capped).

Part Two: Charles Murray, the Long View

Coming Apart caps three decades of faux concern for the poor.

Robert KuttnerApr 05, 2012
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The following is the second in a two-part series on Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. For part one, please click here.

Charles Murray, the Long View

In 1984, the right's star public intellectual wrote the book that drove welfare reform. Coming Apart is an alibi for his own failed big idea.

Robert KuttnerApr 04, 2012
(Courtesy of Crown Forum)

The following is the first in a two-part series on Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

For a generation, the main story of working-class America has been the collapse of a living-wage economy due to such forces as globalization, weakened trade unions, and reduced government labor regulation. This trend has been a social catastrophe and, increasingly, a severe embarrassment to free-market ideology.

Summers' Colleague Criticizes Kim

Robert KuttnerMar 29, 2012
(AP Photo / Michael Dwyer)

Larry Summers has been unnaturally silent on President Obama’s surprise decision to pass him over for the World Bank presidency in favor of Dartmouth University president and public health hero Jim Yong Kim. Well, one of Summers’ closest chums at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Lant Pritchett, has now gone public with a scorching blast at Kim. Pritchett told Forbes magazine, “It’s an embarrassment to the U.S. You cannot with a straight face say this person is the most qualified to lead the World Bank.”

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