political-economy
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Brink Lindsey
Brink Lindsey is a writer and policy thinker who spent decades inside Washington's free-market establishment - vice president for research at the Cato Institute, a leading free-trade voice - before publicly reinventing himself as a 'recovering libertarian.' Now senior vice president at the Niskanen Center, he argues that capable government and robust social insurance are not enemies of markets but their necessary complement. His writing, including The Captured Economy (with Steven Teles) and The Permanent Problem, wrestles with a single paradox: rich countries have never had more material plenty, and people have never felt less satisfied. He explores it weekly from a base in northeastern Thailand on his Substack, The Permanent Problem.
Michael Lind
Michael Lind is an American writer, columnist, and professor who has spent three decades refusing to sit in either political team's section. A fifth-generation Texan who began on the right at the Heritage Foundation and migrated toward New Deal economic nationalism, he co-founded the New America Foundation in 1999, wrote for The New Yorker, Harper's and The New Republic, and now teaches at the LBJ School at UT Austin while writing a column for Tablet. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The New Class War, Land of Promise and Hell to Pay, all of them circling one question: who actually runs the country, and what do they owe the people who don't.
Stan Veuger
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.
James Pethokoukis
James Pethokoukis is a Washington D.C.-based economist, journalist, and author who holds the DeWitt Wallace Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. He writes the 'Faster, Please!' Substack newsletter - one of the leading voices in techno-optimism and pro-progress policy - hosts the 'Political Economy with Jim Pethokoukis' podcast, and authored 'The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised' (2023). A longtime CNBC contributor, he argues that culture - not capital - is the real barrier to the abundant, innovative future humanity could build.
Tom Pepinsky
Tom Pepinsky is the Walter F. LaFeber Professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. A specialist in Southeast Asian comparative politics, democratic backsliding, and political economy, he is best known for his viral 2017 essay 'Everyday Authoritarianism is Boring and Tolerable,' which warned Americans that authoritarian erosion looks mundane from the inside. Fluent in Indonesian, he has written five books spanning Indonesian and Malaysian politics, COVID-19 partisanship, and global democratic challenges. His Substack newsletter, launched in 2025, continues his two-decade tradition of public-facing analysis at the intersection of academic rigor and accessible political commentary.
Adam Tooze
Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University, Director of the European Institute, and one of the most widely-read public intellectuals in economics and geopolitics. His newsletter Chartbook on Substack has over 181,000 subscribers and his books - including The Wages of Destruction, Crashed, and Shutdown - have reshaped how historians, economists, and policymakers understand financial crises, the Nazi economy, and global disorder. He popularized the term 'polycrisis' and co-hosts the Foreign Policy podcast Ones and Tooze. Known for his extraordinary output, analytical range, and willingness to publicly revise his views, Tooze is that rare figure who straddles academic history and live economic commentary with equal authority.