About The American Prospect

Robert Kuttner
Harold Meyerson
Robert B. Reich
Mark Schmitt
Paul Starr

---

Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine, as well as a Demos Distinguished Senior Fellow. He was a longtime columnist for BusinessWeek, and continues to write columns in the Boston Globe.

Bob is the author of eight books, including the recent New York Times bestseller, Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency, (Chelsea Green, 2008). His last book, The Squandering of America (2007), explores political roots of America's narrowing prosperity and the systemic risks facing the U.S. economy. Bob has also begun work on a new book on the challenge of regulating global capitalism.

Bob's best-known earlier book is Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets (1997). The book received a page one review in the New York Times Book Review. Of it, the late economist Robert Heilbroner wrote, "I have never seen the market system better described, more intelligently appreciated, or more trenchantly criticized than in Everything for Sale."

Bob's other previous books on economics and politics include: The End of Laissez-Faire (1991); The Life of the Party (1987); The Economic Illusion (1984); and Revolt of the Haves (1980). Bob's magazine writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Dissent, Columbia Journalism Review, and Harvard Business Review. He has contributed major articles to The New England Journal of Medicine as a national policy correspondent.

His other positions have included national staff writer on The Washington Post, chief investigator of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, economics editor of The New Republic and Washington editor of the Village Voice. His first job was as assistant to I. F. Stone.

Kuttner was educated at Oberlin, The London School of Economics, and the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught at Brandeis, Boston University, the University of Massachusetts, and Harvard's Institute of Politics.

For four decades, Bob's intellectual and political project has been to revive the politics and economics of harnessing capitalism to serve a broad public interest. He has pursued this ideal as a writer, editor, teacher, lecturer, commentator and public official.

Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect.

Meyerson is also political editor and columnist for the L.A. Weekly, the nation's largest metropolitan weekly, where he served as executive editor from 1989 through 2001. His articles on politics, labor, the economy, foreign policy and American culture have also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, The New Statesman; the op-ed, commentary, and book review sections of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, and in numerous other publications.

He is the author of Who Put The Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?, a critical biography of Broadway lyricist Yip Harburg, and his articles have been republished in several books, most notably the Brookings Institution's Bush v. Gore. In 1987-8, he was a regular commentator in The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, and from the late '70s through the mid-'80s, he was a political consultant for a range of progressive causes and candidates.

From 1991 through 1995, Meyerson hosted the weekly show "Real Politics" on radio station KCRW, the Los Angeles area's leading NPR affiliate. He has been a frequent guest on televison and radio talk shows.

Born in Los Angeles in 1950, Meyerson was educated in Los Angeles public schools and at Columbia University. He lives in Washington, but maintains the pretense of bi-coastalism by swooping down on Los Angeles at more-or-less monthly intervals.

Robert B. Reich is co-founder of The American Prospect. His new book, published in 2007, is called Supercapitalism, published by Alfred Knopf. In it, he explains why capitalism is triumphing while democracy is foundering, and what can be done to revive democracy and make capitalism work for the common good.

Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He previously has served on the faculties of Harvard and Brandeis universities.

He has also served in three national administrations, most recently as the nation's 22nd Secretary of Labor under President Clinton. Under Reich's leadership, the Labor Department moved forward on several initiatives to build the skills of American workers. The department cracked down on unsafe work sites and fraudulent purveyors of pensions and health insurance. It initiated a national crusade to abolish sweatshops in the United States and to eradicate child labor around the world. Under Secretary Reich, the Family and Medical Leave Act was passed and implemented. In addition, Reich was instrumental in raising the minimum wage for the first time since 1989. Reich was an assistant to the solicitor general in the Ford administration, representing the United States before the U.S. Supreme Court, and he headed the policy planning staff of the Federal Trade Commission during the Carter administration.

Reich is the author of eleven books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into 22 languages, the best-seller Locked in the Cabinet, The Future of Success, and Reason. He has written more than 200 articles on the global economy, the changing nature of work, and the centrality of human capital. He is a consultant to many governments and corporations.

Reich was the host of the widely acclaimed four-part public TV series Made in AmericaAt the Grass Roots (1992), and the writer and host of the PBS special (1998). He also co-hosted the public TV series The Long and the Short of It. His weekly radio commentary can be heard every Wednesday evening on public radio's "Marketplace," and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Britain's Observer, and many other publications. In 2003, Reich won the prestigious Vaclev Havel Prize, given annually by the former Czech to someone who has made singular contributions to world economic and social thought.

Mark Schmitt is executive editor of The American Prospect.

Schmitt has been a contributor to the Prospect since 2001 and a columnist for the magazine since 2005, as well as a frequent contributor to TAPPED. He was a senior fellow at the New America Foundation where he helped to develop a new initiative on The Next Social Contract, a cross-cutting effort to find the underlying principles and policies appropriate to the emerging economy.

Before joining the New America Foundation in 2005, Mark was a program director at the Open Society Institute in New York for seven years. Previously, he served as policy director for Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, as well as a senior adviser on Bradley’s 2000 presidential campaign. He is an expert on budget and tax policy, reform of the political process, and the history and role of ideas in politics.

In addition to appearing in The American Prospect, Mark’s writing has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, Democracy, the Financial Times, and other publications, and he has contributed chapters to several books. His own blog, The Decembrist, was named one of the five best political blogs by Forbes magazine in 2003, and he has also been a regular contributor to TPM Café.

Paul Starr co-founded The American Prospect in 1990 and is co-editor (with Robert Kuttner) of the magazine as well as professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. Starr ran the Prospect's office for its first two years, when the Prospect was published out of Princeton. After the magazine moved to Cambridge in 1992, Starr remained co-editor, except for a stint in the Clinton White House in 1993.

In 1994 he founded the Electronic Policy Network, now known as Moving Ideas.

Before joining the Princeton faculty, Starr was an associate professor at Harvard and spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study. Though he has published extensively in academic journals, he has written even more widely for a general audience. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The New England Journal of Medicine, among other publications; he has written or co-written eight books, including The Social Transformation of American Medicine, which won the C. Wright Mills award, the Bancroft Prize in American History, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. In great demand as an expert on health care (The Chicago Tribune called him "health care's Tom Paine"), Starr took a brief leave from the Prospect in 1993 in order to serve as an adviser to the White House on health policy.

In 2004 Starr published The Creation of the Media, which won the Goldsmith Book Prize. In 2007 Basic Books published his book, Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism.

Starr, whom The Washington Post has described as "a prolific writer and meticulous editor" known for his "blend of idealism and pragmatism," writes a column for The American Prospect. He lives in Princeton and, with his wife Ann, has four children and three step-children.