I Have A New Job

And: It's Good

Photo courtesy of AgnosticPreachersKid under Creative Commons License

Time for some professional news. After a wonderful year with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's Economy and Society Initiative, I have moved my métier to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where I will be working alongside Stewart Patrick at the Global Order and Institutions Program. 

For readers of this newsletter, the change will mean very little. Carnegie is a think tank, while the Hewlett Foundation is a philanthropy, but my job will not be radically different: I'll be reading and thinking and writing, and talking to people about reading and thinking and writing. There will be a bit more foreign policy in my reading and thinking and writing mix, as Carnegie specializes in foreign policy, but my work has been trending in that direction over the past year, and to some extent since the publication of my book. For much of the 21st century, the biggest problem facing the U.S. economy was a chronic deficiency of demand. This was a relatively simple problem to solve, as the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated. Today, the most pressing economic questions more directly concern how to cultivate and coordinate the world's resources for productive ends. These issues are more difficult to address than demand management, and more fundamentally diplomatic. Many geopolitical matters that seemed to be settled at the turn of the millennium have become unsettled in recent years, and Carnegie has been doing outstanding work on how the global order could and should evolve. Plus, they have a nice logo.

You can read my Q and A with Carnegie announcing my arrival here.