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.
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.