One of the things I love about being an editor is being able to pull together the definitive package of articles on an urgent and complex topic. My colleagues and I were able to do that with our recent special issue on the case for a Green New Deal. While there have been literally dozens of reports and policy papers using that imagery and metaphor, none accomplished what ours did. We demonstrated that a rapid shift to a post-carbon economy combined with a massive investment in public infrastructure is not only urgent but practical—technically, fiscally, and politically.
Get links to every story in the Green New Deal issue here.
I was very proud of the work that David Dayen and other Prospect authors did on the evils of economic concentration, in tech, in the drug industry, hospitals, retail, and elsewhere in the economy. It’s a classic case of what the Prospect does best—taking a topic that is somewhat daunting and rendering a lucid story as analysis, investigation, and narrative. One of the best was Natalie Shure’s piece in our Summer issue on the monopoly pricing of insulin, a century-old drug long in the public domain.
Read “The Insulin Racket” by Natalie Shure.
My own favorite piece in 2019 was the cover story for our Spring issue on Trump’s best appointee, maybe his only good appointee, chief trade negotiator Robert Lighthizer. The question I posed was “Will Robert Lighthizer restrain Donald Trump’s impulse to take a headline-grabbing and self-defeating China deal?” I was skeptical that Lighthizer could make real progress on the U.S.-China relationship. Sure enough, when the deal was finally announced in December, after months of posturing, Trump rescinded tariffs, China offered to buy a lot more stuff, but failed to change its mercantilist system in any notable way.
