Ryan Avent is an American economics writer and author who spent 15 years at The Economist, six of them writing the magazine's flagship Free Exchange column. He wrote The Wealth of Humans (2016), a widely discussed argument that automation, globalization and a productive elite are creating a glut of labor that breaks the old social contract of work. He now runs portfolio communications at the investment fund Select Equity Group, writes the Substack newsletter The Bellows, and has a book on belief and the fate of societies forthcoming from Yale University Press.
Arnold Kling is an American economist, author, and blogger who turned a career spanning the Federal Reserve, Freddie Mac, and a sold-at-the-peak internet startup into one of the most charitable, contrarian voices in online economics. He writes the popular Substack 'In My Tribe,' is best known for 'The Three Languages of Politics,' and built a following by taking the most charitable view of those who disagree with him.
Austan Goolsbee is the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, one of the most closely watched voices on U.S. interest rates and inflation. A longtime University of Chicago Booth economist who chaired Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, he is equally known for empirical research on the internet and taxes and for being the rare central banker who once won Washington's funniest celebrity contest.
Conor Sen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and founder of Peachtree Creek Investments, an Atlanta-based money management firm. He built a national following by reading the economy through housing, demographics and the slow grind of millennials moving through their life stages, and turned a habit of arguing with strangers on Twitter into one of the most-cited macro voices in financial media. His tagline, 'The future is a policy choice,' doubles as his worldview.
Gordon Gray is a Washington economic policy hand who turned a decade of budget-table fluency into his own shop. He launched the nonpartisan Pinpoint Policy Institute as its executive director after more than ten years as vice president for economic policy at the American Action Forum. A veteran of Senate offices and two presidential-cycle campaigns, he translates federal budgets, tax law, and macroeconomic forecasts into testimony before Congress and commentary across The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, NPR, and Fox Business.
Greg Mankiw is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard and the author of the best-selling economics textbooks of his generation. A leading New Keynesian theorist, he chaired the President's Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, taught Harvard's famous Ec10 introductory course, advised Mitt Romney's campaigns, and founded the Pigou Club to champion carbon taxes. His textbook 'Principles of Economics' has sold more than two million copies and been translated into about twenty languages.
Jason Furman is an American economist who chaired President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017 and now teaches the famous Economics 10 introductory course at Harvard alongside David Laibson. The Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, he is one of the most widely quoted policy economists working today, dissecting tariffs, inflation, deficits and AI in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Project Syndicate and on his prolific X feed.
John H. Cochrane is an American economist, the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and author of the field-defining textbook Asset Pricing. A physicist-turned-finance scholar, he champions the fiscal theory of the price level, writes the popular free-market blog and Substack The Grumpy Economist, co-stars on Hoover's GoodFellows broadcast, and flies competition sailplanes in his spare time.
Justin Wolfers is an Australian-American economist who turns dense data into plain talk for the rest of us. A professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan's Ford School, he co-hosts the Think Like an Economist podcast with his partner Betsey Stevenson, writes the Platypus Economics newsletter, and is one of the most quoted economic voices in American media. His work spans macroeconomics, labor markets, prediction markets, sports, and the surprisingly stubborn question of whether money buys happiness (his answer: more than people think).
Lawrence Henry Summers is one of the most influential and combative American economists of his generation. He was the 71st U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, chief economist of the World Bank, the 27th president of Harvard University, and director of the National Economic Council under President Obama. A John Bates Clark Medal winner who earned tenure at Harvard at 28, he became famous for the 'secular stagnation' thesis and for loudly warning, against the consensus, that the 2021 stimulus would ignite inflation. In late 2025 and early 2026, the release of his email correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein triggered a rapid unwinding of his public roles.
Martin Wolf is the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, where his columns have shaped the thinking of policymakers, central bankers, and investors for nearly four decades. A former World Bank economist who never finished a PhD, he became, in Lawrence Summers' words, 'the world's preeminent financial journalist.' Once a forceful champion of globalization and free markets, he reversed course after the 2008 crash and now argues that capitalism must be fixed to save democracy itself.
Michael R. Strain is one of Washington's most-cited economists - director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, author of 'The American Dream Is Not Dead (But Populism Could Kill It),' and a columnist whose data-first optimism cuts against the grain of both parties. He studies labor markets, macroeconomics, public finance, and social policy, testifies before Congress, teaches at Georgetown, and writes for the Financial Times and Project Syndicate.
Scott Sumner is the economist behind The Money Illusion, the blog that turned an obscure idea - that central banks should target nominal GDP, not just inflation - into a mainstream policy debate. The intellectual force behind market monetarism, he spent 33 years teaching at Bentley before becoming the Ralph G. Hawtrey Chair Emeritus of Monetary Policy at George Mason's Mercatus Center. A late bloomer who bought his first cell phone in 2011, he is also a prolific film reviewer who has watched and rated thousands of movies.
Stan Veuger is a Dutch-born economist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies political economy and public finance, and who became briefly famous in 2025 for co-authoring the AEI analysis that exposed a factor-of-four error at the heart of the Trump administration's reciprocal tariff formula. A Harvard PhD with a stack of unrelated degrees in Spanish literature, law, and business, he edits AEI Economic Perspectives, teaches at Harvard, and once published peer-reviewed research proving that LeBron James measurably increased the number of restaurants near his arena.
Noah Smith is an independent economist-turned-writer best known for Noahpinion, one of Substack's largest economics newsletters with over 414,000 subscribers. A former Bloomberg Opinion columnist and ex-finance professor at Stony Brook University, he writes about technology, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and domestic policy with a techno-optimist, center-left lens. He also co-hosts the 'Econ 102' podcast with Erik Torenberg and is working on an English-language macroeconomics book.
Matthew Zeitlin is an economics and energy journalist currently reporting for Heatmap News, where he covers the intersection of policy, finance, and the energy transition. With bylines at BuzzFeed News, Grid, Slate, The Nation, n+1, Bloomberg Opinion, and The Atlantic, Zeitlin has built a career dissecting how money, power, and policy shape the energy grid. He writes a personal economics newsletter on Substack and is one of the sharper voices covering how the U.S. economy navigates decarbonization.
Joe Weisenthal is a Bloomberg executive editor, co-anchor of 'What'd You Miss?' on Bloomberg Television, and co-host of the Odd Lots podcast with Tracy Alloway. Known on Twitter/X as @TheStalwart, he has spent 20+ years making arcane financial topics accessible and engaging for broad audiences. He helped grow Business Insider into a 50-million-visitor destination, then brought that digital-first energy to Bloomberg. His Odd Lots podcast, launched in 2015, is one of the most respected finance podcasts in the world. He is also one-quarter of the band Light Sweet Crude, proving that a man can love yield curves and guitar riffs in equal measure.