Oren Cass

The Dispatch

The Man Who Argued Capitalism Forgot the Worker

In April 2025, as markets shuddered and tariffs dominated every business broadcast, Oren Cass sat across from Fareed Zakaria and made a case most economists found close to heresy: a broad, global tariff on imports, he said, "is the right way to do things." It was, in his words, "a very simple, broad policy that conveys a value that we see in domestic production."

That value - production over consumption, the worker over the shopper - is the spine of everything Cass has built. He is the founder and chief economist of American Compass, the Washington think tank he launched in February 2020 to answer a single uncomfortable question: what is the economy actually for? His answer rejects the consensus he was trained in. The point of an economy, he insists, is not to make goods as cheap as possible. It is to let people "find a good, stable job with dignity" that lets them support a family and feel like a contributor to their community.

It is a strange place to land for a former Bain & Company consultant who once produced the domestic-policy "jobs book" for Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign. Cass spent his early career inside the machinery of free-market Republicanism. He came out the other side convinced the machinery was broken.

The conversion was not sudden. It was a slow accumulation of evidence, gathered over years of watching the policies he helped advance fail to deliver. After Romney lost in 2012, Cass concluded that the party's "blind faith in free markets" had left it unable to win elections, let alone address the social erosion of working-class America. Tax cuts, free trade, deregulation - the holy trinity of conservative economics - had, in his telling, hollowed out the very communities the right claimed to champion.

Origins

A Bullpen Catcher Who Learned to Warm Up Ideas

At Williams College, where he earned a B.A. in political economy, Cass was a varsity baseball bullpen catcher - the player who crouches in the corner of the field, warming up the pitcher nobody is watching yet. It is an oddly fitting biography for a man whose career has been spent readying arguments for others to throw. Today those others include a sitting vice president and a secretary of state.

From Williams he went to Bain & Company, working out of both the Boston and New Delhi offices from 2005 to 2015. Midway through, he detoured to Harvard Law School - not to practice law, but to deepen his grasp of public policy. He finished magna cum laude and served as vice president and treasurer of the Harvard Law Review, running its budget and operations. He never really left policy: while still a student, he ran domestic policy for a presidential campaign.

In 2015 he joined the Manhattan Institute as a senior fellow and became, almost overnight, one of the most prolific scholars in conservative policy. He wrote more than fifteen reports, edited the "Issues 2016" and "Issues 2020" briefing series, and testified before seven congressional committees. Politico named him to its top-50 list of "thinkers, doers and visionaries." The free-market establishment had produced one of its sharpest in-house critics.

The Argument

The Once and Future Worker

In 2018 Cass published The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. The book's thesis is deceptively plain: a healthy society depends not on rising consumption but on a labor market strong enough to sustain families and communities. Treat citizens as consumers and you optimize for cheap stuff. Treat them as producers and you optimize for something harder to measure and far more valuable - the dignity of being needed.

The reception cut across the usual tribal lines. New York Times columnist David Brooks called it "absolutely brilliant." JD Vance - then a venture capitalist, now Vice President - called it "a brilliant book, and among the most important I've ever read." Jason Furman, who chaired Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, praised it as thoughtful and carefully argued even where he disagreed. When a conservative labor manifesto draws applause from an Obama economist, something unusual is happening.

Cass calls his framework "productive pluralism" - the conditions in which people "of diverse abilities, priorities, and geographies" can form self-sufficient families and contribute to their communities. In 2025 he gathered the movement's thinking into The New Conservatives: Restoring America's Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry, a volume he edited and published through American Compass.

In His Words

The Cass Doctrine, Quoted

The Influence

Heresy That Became House Policy

What makes Cass unusual is not that he holds contrarian views - Washington is full of contrarians who never move anyone. It is that his views moved. The ideas he assembled at American Compass now surface, sometimes nearly verbatim, in the rhetoric of Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Back in 2014, Rubio publicly credited Cass with shaping his poverty-fighting proposals. The think tank built to imagine "what the post-Trump right-of-center is going to be" ended up helping define the Trump-era right itself.

That influence comes with a target on his back. Through 2025, as tariff policy collided with inflation and market volatility, Cass became the public face critics aimed at - profiled in Reason, jabbed at by the Independent Institute, sparring with economist Noah Smith on the a16z show over whether tariffs can really reindustrialize a country. He has not flinched. He treats the debate as the whole point: the orthodoxy he is fighting, he argues, went unchallenged for decades precisely because no one on the right was willing to take the other side.

He lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife and three children, a continent away from the K Street think-tank corridor he has reshaped. The distance seems deliberate. The argument he is making - that place, family, and work matter more than price tags - reads better from a small town than from a downtown office.

Quirks & Footnotes

Five Things Worth Knowing

• The CatcherHe warmed up pitchers as a bullpen catcher on the Williams varsity baseball team - a quiet role for a man who now scripts arguments for the powerful.
• Delhi DaysHis consulting years included a stint in Bain's New Delhi office, not only Boston - a global apprenticeship for a thinker now obsessed with domestic production.
• Policy Before DiplomaHe ran the domestic-policy shop of a presidential campaign before he finished his law degree.
• The LedgerAs VP and treasurer of the Harvard Law Review, he literally kept the journal's books.
• The EndorsementA future Vice President called his first book among the most important he had ever read.