Biography

I am Founding Director of Essential Economics, an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University, and a Fellow of the OSF Ideas Workshop. I work on policy responses to inflation and have advised policymakers in the US, Germany, Europe and Latin America on price stabilization measures.

My new book, Anti-Fascist Economics, will be released by Penguin Random House in fall 2026. My next book is Essential: Inflation, Profits and Survival in an Age of Emergencies, also under contract with Penguin Random House. My first book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate, was translated into five languages and featured on the best book of 2021 lists by the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate and Folha de S.Paulo, among others.

My writings have appeared in The New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung.

I am a Member of the Honorary Board of the Global Progress Foundation and of the Global Council on New Economics for the 21st Century.  I am a publisher of Surplus, a German economics magazine. I have won grants as principal investigator from the ESRC-funded Rebuilding Macroeconomics, Open Society Foundation, New Venture Fund and the Global Fund for a New Economy, among others. I have a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research, New York, and a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge. I have been a visiting researcher at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and speak Chinese.