Bio

For most of his career, Bob has been an economics journalist. He is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine, He was a longtime columnist for BusinessWeek, and continues to write columns for The New York Times international edition. He was a founder of the Economic Policy Institute and serves on its board.

Bob is author of thirteen books, including the 2008 New York Times bestseller, Obama’s Challenge: American’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency; and most recently, The Stakes 2020 His best-known earlier book is Everything for Sale: the Virtues and Limits of Markets (1997). His other books on economics and politics include: The Squandering of America (2007), The End of Laissez-Faire (1991); The Life of the Party (1987); The Economic Illusion (1984); Revolt of the Haves (1980), and Debtors’ Prison (2013).

Bob’s other writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and Book ReviewThe AtlanticHarpersThe New RepublicThe New YorkerDissentForeign AffairsNew StatesmanColumbia Journalism ReviewPolitical Science Quarterly, 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 and columnist on The Washington Post, chief investigator of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, executive director of President Carter’s National Commission on Neighborhoods, and economics editor of The New Republic. His first job was assisting the legendary independent journalist, I.F. Stone.

As a scholar and teacher, he has taught at Boston University, the University of Oregon, the University of Massachusetts, and the Institute of Politics at Harvard, as well as his present chair at The Heller School at Brandeis.

He is the two-time winner of the Sidney Hillman Journalism Award, the John Hancock Award for Business and Financial Writing, the Jack London Award for Labor Writing, and the Paul Hoffman Award of the United Nations Development Program for his lifetime work on economic efficiency and social justice. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, German Marshall Fund Fellow, and John F. Kennedy Fellow.

Bob’s journalism and scholarly research has been at the intersection of economics and politics. His current research is on the impact of globalization on political democracy at the level of the nation state; and on possible alternatives to the current structure of the economy that would be more conducive to greater equality of income, wealth, and opportunity as well as to stronger democracy.

He speaks to a wide variety of audiences in the US and abroad, and appears regularly on radio and TV.

Robert Kuttner was educated at Oberlin College (A.B), The London School of Economics, and the University of California at Berkeley (M.A). He holds  honorary doctorates from Oberlin and Swarthmore.