Help us continue to be your leading source for trustworthy news and information

Take our 2025 PBS NewsHour audience survey

Take the survey
PBSNewsHour_AmnaGeoff_AnchorDesk_CreditMikeMorgan (1)
Paul Solman

About Paul

Paul Solman has been a correspondent for the PBS News Hour since 1985, mainly covering business and economics.

While attending Brandeis University, Solman joined the Brandeis newspaper, The Justice, and eventually became its editor. He got his first journalism job in 1970 at the alternative weekly Boston After Dark.

Solman became founding editor of the rival alternative weekly The Real Paper in 1972 and went on to become a feature writer and investigative reporter.

Solman received an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1978.

After a few years of local PBS reporting, he inaugurated the PBS business documentary series, ENTERPRISE with fellow Nieman Fellow Zvi Dor-Ner.

In the 1980s, Solman produced documentaries, returned to local reporting, and joined the Harvard Business School faculty, teaching media, finance and business history in the school's Advanced Management Program. He also co-authored “Life and Death on the Corporate Battlefield” in 1983, which appeared in Japanese, German and Taiwanese editions. He joined the MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1985.

In the '90s, with sociologist Morrie Schwartz, a teacher of his at Brandeis, Solman helped create -- and wrote the introduction to the book "Morrie: In His Own Words," which preceded "Tuesdays with Morrie.” In 2015, Solman co-authored “Get What's Yours: the Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security.”

Solman has lectured on college campuses since the '80s and has written for numerous publications, including the Journal of Economic Education. As a one-time cab driver, kindergarten teacher, crafts store co-owner and management consultant, he was also the author and presenter of "Discovering Economics with Paul Solman," a series of videos to accompany introductory economics textbooks.

In 2007, he joined the faculty at Yale, where he contributed to the university's Grand Strategy course for a decade. In 2011, he was the Richman Distinguished Visiting Professor at his alma mater, Brandeis, where he taught a seminar, "Economic Grand Strategies: From Chimps to Champs? Or Chumps?" He has taught regularly at West Point, the Naval War College and was an adjunct faculty member at Gateway Community College in New Haven, CT, where he created the evening program, “Yale@Gateway.” In 2016, he was a Visiting Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford University.

Since 2019, Solman has chaired the board of the anti-polarization American Exchange Project, a nonpolitical nonprofit domestic "foreign exchange" program that introduces high school seniors from everywhere in America to each other, sends and embeds them, for free, in communities unlike their own.

Solman took up tennis at 50. His father was the American expressionist artist Joseph Solman. He is married with two children and seven grandchildren.

Full Bio

Paul’s Recent Stories

Economy Dec 10

How Would the Fiscal Cliff Affect Your Tax Bill?

Ettore Sottsass, Summa 19 Electronic Printing Calculator, 1970. Manufactured by Ing. C. Olivetti & C. S.p.A., Italy. Photo courtesy of the Denver Art Museum. As we all watch the folks in Washington wrangle over how to avert the fiscal cliff,…

Economy Dec 10

The Hysterical Economy

Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images. Paul Solman: "Ask Larry" Kotlikoff is best known on this page as the Social Security guru who answers your questions every Monday, as he did this morning. In the real world, though, he's…

Economy Dec 10

The Hysterical Economy

Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images. Paul Solman: "Ask Larry" Kotlikoff is best known on this page as the Social Security guru who answers your questions every Monday, as he did this morning. In the real world, though, he's a sometimes…

Economy Dec 10

How Would the Fiscal Cliff Affect Your Tax Bill?

Ettore Sottsass, Summa 19 Electronic Printing Calculator, 1970. Manufactured by Ing. C. Olivetti & C. S.p.A., Italy. Photo courtesy of the Denver Art Museum. As we all watch the folks in Washington wrangle over how to avert the fiscal cliff,…

Economy Dec 07

Great Jobs Numbers? U-7 Says It Ain’t Necessarily So

Applicants meet potential employers at the Diversity Job Fair on December 6, 2012 in Manhattan, New York City. Hundreds of minorities turned out to seek jobs, a day ahead of the release of monthly national unemployment figures in Washington DC.

Economy Dec 05

Argument For and Against Capital Gains Tax Cuts

Co-chairman of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform former Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., left, and Erskine Bowles, former White House chief of staff recommend taxing capital gains as ordinary income. Photo by Bill Clark/Roll Call via Getty Images.

Support Provided By: Learn more