Preview

For most of my career as a journalist, I’ve covered the intersection of economics, politics, and social justice. That means addressing what it takes politically to produce a decent society by energizing democracy to contain the rapacious aspects of raw capitalism. This takes me into such broad areas as the rise and (one hopes) the fall of neoliberalism and its handmaiden, orthodox economics; the corruption and (maybe) the redemption of the Democratic Party; and various aspects of globalization.

As an expression of these interests, I cover several beats for the Prospect, including financial regulation, economic policy generally, trade, as well as politics, ideology, and political power. I pretty much hold down the Prospect China desk. My latest book, Going Big, was on the surprising progressivism of the Biden administration and the importance of keeping Biden on that course, a subject I’ve repeatedly addressed in the Prospect. I write some of these pieces as features, either print or online, and some in my column every Tuesday and in my thrice-weekly On Tap posts.

One of the most important in 2022 was our February special issue on the supply chain crisis. China was at the heart of that debacle, as I covered in this piece. I followed up with a piece in our June issue on what a progressive form of globalization might look like.

I wrote several pieces on electoral politics and the challenge of organizing, especially the need for Democrats to do better with rural voters—which in fact they did do in November. I also challenged the conventional wisdom all last summer and fall that the 2022 midterms would be a rout for Democrats.
My interest in organizing and strategies for countervailing the power of capital took me into a retrospective look at the grassroots impact of legislation that I wrote early in my career when I worked as a Senate investigator—the Community Reinvestment Act.

In our current (December) issue, I covered the several stresses on the European Union. Reporting from Paris, I also wrote several pieces and posts about what we can learn from the French medical system, including why American hospital bills are so padded.

The perversity of the Federal Reserve’s tight-money policy has become an obsession for me. I’ve written several pieces, most recently this one on the Fed’s latest rate hike.

We will soon be launching a series of pieces that I will edit, by dissenting economists, unpacking every aspect of the current inflation, its causes and cures. As a related sideline, I continue to monitor and debunk the longtime nemesis of progressive politics and sound economics, Larry Summers.

Since progressives rely heavily on affirmative government, we need to know what it takes to make government work. That can get a little wonky. The challenge is to write it as narrative journalism. My major recent piece on that topic was a deep dive into an obscure but powerful federal agency, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which has been repurposed under Biden from anti-regulation to pro-regulation.

The New Yorker’s celebrated press critic A.J. Liebling liked to observe that in practice, freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one. Having worked half my career for magazines and newspapers that belong to other people, I can report that it’s better to enjoy the freedom of working at an independent publication, accountable to its readers and led by its editors. Thank you for reading and supporting the Prospect.

~ROBERT KUTTNER