Profile

Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine, and a senior fellow at the think-tank Demos. He was a longtime columnist for BusinessWeek, and continues to write columns for Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times international edition. He was a founder of the Economic Policy Institute and serves on its board.
Kuttner is author of ten books, including the 2008 New York Times bestseller, Obama's Challenge: American's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. His 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, in which the 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.” 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 the forthcoming Debtors’ Prison (2013).
Kuttner’s other writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Dissent, Foreign Affairs, New Statesman, Columbia Journalism Review, Political 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.
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.
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 an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College. He has taught at Brandeis, Boston University, the University of Oregon, University of Massachusetts, and Harvard’s Institute of Politics.