Charles Austin Beard (1874–1948) was an American historian and professor, who wrote primarily during the first half of the 20th century. A history professor at Columbia University, Beard's influence is primarily due to his publications in the fields of history and political science. His works included a radical re-evaluation of the Founding Fathers of the United States, whom he believed to be more motivated by economics than by philosophical principles. Beard's most influential book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), has been the subject of great controversy ever since its publication. While it has been frequently criticized for its methodology and conclusions, it was responsible for a wide-ranging reinterpretation of early American history.
Raymond Bonner is an American author and investigative reporter who has been a staff writer at The New York Times, The New Yorker and has contributed to The New York Review of Books. His latest book, Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, was published by Knopf in February 2012.
Ivan Frederick Boesky is a former American stock trader who became infamous for his prominent role in an insider trading scandal that occurred in the United States during the mid-1980s. He was charged and pled guilty to insider trading, was fined a record $100 million, served three years in prison and became an informant.
David Callahan is an American writer and editor. He is the founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, a digital media site, and Blue Tent Daily, which offers in-depth reporting on progressive organizations and the Democratic Party. Previously, he was a senior fellow at Demos, a public policy group based in New York City that he co-founded in 1999. He is also an author and lecturer. He is best known as the author of the books The Givers and The Cheating Culture.
Nouriel Roubini is a Turkish-born Iranian-American economic consultant, economist, and writer. He is a Professor Emeritus since 2021 at the Stern School of Business of New York University.
George Franklin Gilder is an American investor, author, economist, and co-founder of the Discovery Institute. His 1981 book, Wealth and Poverty, advanced a case for supply-side economics and capitalism during the early months of the Reagan administration. He is the chairman of George Gilder Fund Management, LLC.
Robber baron is a derogatory term of social criticism originally applied to certain wealthy and powerful 19th-century American businessmen. The term appeared as early as the August 1870 issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. By the late 19th century, the term was typically applied to businessmen who purportedly used exploitative practices to amass their wealth. These practices included exerting control over natural resources, influencing high levels of government, paying subsistence wages, squashing competition by acquiring their competitors to create monopolies and raise prices, and schemes to sell stock at inflated prices to unsuspecting investors. The term combines the sense of criminal ("robber") and illegitimate aristocracy.
James Mann is a Washington-based journalist and author. He has written a series of non-fiction books, including three about America's relationship with China and four more about American foreign policy. His group biography about George W. Bush's war cabinet, Rise of The Vulcans, was a New York Times best-seller. As a newspaper journalist, he worked for more than two decades for the Los Angeles Times, where he served as Supreme Court correspondent, Beijing bureau chief, and foreign-policy columnist. Earlier in his career, he worked at The Washington Post, where he took part in the newspaper's Watergate coverage.
Michael Moynihan is an American author and the nephew of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former Senator (Democrat) from New York. He wrote The Coming American Renaissance, a rebuttal of works by Lester Thurow and others, argued that America possessed a unique set of economic advantages that would propel it to global leadership in the 21st century. Moynihan cited technology leadership, in particular, as a driver of economic growth. He worked in the Clinton administration as an advisor to Secretaries of the Treasury, Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin from 1996 to 1999. Moynihan was in charge of Internet and electronic commerce policy and was involved with the effort to pass the Internet Tax Freedom Act. Moynihan founded the Internet website AlwaysonTV.
Gar Alperovitz is an American historian and political economist. Alperovitz served as a fellow of King's College, Cambridge; a founding fellow of the Harvard Institute of Politics; a founding Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution; and the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland Department of Government and Politics from 1999 to 2015. He also served as a legislative director in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate and as a special assistant in the US Department of State. Alperovitz is a distinguished lecturer with the American Historical Society, co-founded the Democracy Collaborative and co-chairs its Next System Project with James Gustav Speth.
James Paul Warburg was a German-born American banker. He was well known for being the financial adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt. His father was banker Paul Warburg, member of the Warburg family and "father" of the Federal Reserve system. After World War II, Warburg helped organize the Society for the Prevention of World War III in support of the Morgenthau Plan.
Martin A. Siegel is an American former investment banker who was convicted, along with Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, for insider trading during the 1980s.
Robert L. Kuttner is an American journalist and writer whose works present a liberal/progressive point of view. Kuttner is the co-founder and current co-editor of The American Prospect, which was created in 1990 as an "authoritative magazine of liberal ideas," according to its mission statement. He was a 20-year columnist for Business Week and The Boston Globe.
Lawrence Wright is an American writer and journalist, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Wright is best known as the author of the 2006 nonfiction book Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright is also known for his work with documentarian Alex Gibney who directed film versions of Wright's one man show My Trip to Al-Qaeda and his book Going Clear. His 2020 novel, The End of October, a thriller about a pandemic, was released in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, to generally positive reviews.
Gary Taubes is an American journalist, writer, and low-carbohydrate / high-fat (LCHF) diet advocate. His central claim is that carbohydrates, especially sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, overstimulate the secretion of insulin, causing the body to store fat in fat cells and the liver, and that it is primarily a high level of dietary carbohydrate consumption that accounts for obesity and other metabolic syndrome conditions. He is the author of Nobel Dreams (1987); Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (1993); Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), titled The Diet Delusion (2008) in the UK and Australia; Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It (2010); The Case Against Sugar (2016); and The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating (2020). Taubes's work often goes against accepted scientific, governmental, and popular tenets such as that obesity is caused by eating too much and exercising too little and that excessive consumption of fat, especially saturated fat in animal products, leads to cardiovascular disease.
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence is a 1974 controversial non-fiction political book written by Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and John D. Marks, a former officer of the United States Department of State.
Following the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, there was a worldwide resurgence of interest in Keynesian economics among prominent economists and policy makers. This included discussions and implementation of economic policies in accordance with the recommendations made by John Maynard Keynes in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, most especially fiscal stimulus and expansionary monetary policy.
Dan Chiasson is an American poet, critic, and journalist. The Sewanee Review called Chiasson "the country’s most visible poet-critic." He is the Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English Literature at Wellesley College.
Phillip Lee "Phill" Swagel is an American economist who is currently the director of the Congressional Budget Office. As Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy from 2006 to 2009, he played an important role in the Troubled Asset Relief Program that was part of the U.S. government's response to the financial crisis of 2007–08. He was recently a Professor in International Economics at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, a non-resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, senior fellow at the Milken Institute, and co-chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center's Financial Regulatory Reform Initiative.
Reihan Morshed Salam is a conservative American political commentator, columnist and author who since 2019 has been president of the Manhattan Institute. He was previously executive editor of National Review, a columnist for Slate, a contributing editor at National Affairs, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, an interviewer for VICE and a fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
