Zachary Karabell

He’s had high-powered finance jobs — he served as head of global strategies at Envestnet, a wealth management company; president of Fred Alger & Company, a securities firm; and as executive vice president, chief economist and portfolio manager at Fred Alger Management, a mutual fund company.

In his spare time, he has penned 12 books about history and economics, including a biography of President Chester Arthur, a compilation of White House transcripts during the Civil Rights era, and a history of the Suez Canal. He’s a contributing editor at Politico Magazine, a contributor to Wired, and a prolific writer at numerous other publications. His podcast, “What Could Go Right?” looks at the optimistic side of economics and technology.

Zach’s next book, coming in 2021, is Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power. Most recently, he wrote The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers That Rule Our World, in which he describes the accidental and arbitrary aspects of official statistics like Gross Domestic Product, Consumer Product Inflation, and the unemployment rate. These figures dominate economic policy thinking — but don’t accurately measure the things they claim to measure.

This matters, because GDP, CPI, and unemployment figures play a dominant role in how the government tries to fight poverty and expand jobs. “We act as if they are markers from time immemorial, but in fact they were invented…after the Depression and World War II and are now seriously outdated,” Zach wrote in The Atlantic. “For an information economy…awash in apps that cost nothing yet enable commerce, [GDP] is not up to the task…our employment numbers are mute about 20-somethings who leave their paying jobs to create new ones.

Zach is a New Yorker, through and through, born and raised on the Upper West Side. Zach only had to go a few blocks north for college, at Columbia. He did spend a couple years abroad in his twenties, obtaining an M.Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Ph.D. in International Relations from Harvard. But before long, he was back home in Manhattan. “A lot of my friends left New York when COVID hit,” he says. “I stayed. We all had to make choices, but this is where I grew up.”

Today, Zach serves as founder of the Progress Network at New America, where he also sits on the Board of Directors, and as president of River Twice Research. At FREOPP, Zach is a member of our Board of Advisors, where he injects his distinctive brand of policy thinking into our work. “I’m honored to be associated with FREOPP,” he says. “At a time when we urgently need creative, hard-nosed solutions to our greatest challenges, free of partisan blinders, FREOPP is doing the work that must be done.”