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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

Arts Apr 13

Making Sen$e: The ‘Real’ Effects of Unemployment

Paul Solman answers questions from NewsHour viewers and web users on business and economic news most days on his Making Sen$e page. Here's Wednesday's query: Name: George Sacco Question: In these economic reports there never seems to…

Arts Apr 12

Tool$ Tuesday: Tips For Tax Day

Tax day is breathing down our necks: just under one week left to file. And that's including this year's three-day extension; tax day bumped from the traditional April 15th to the 18th, since D.C. government workers have the day off…

Arts Apr 07

Making Sen$e: The Need for a Long-Term Budget Fix

Alice Rivlin (seated in green) with Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, during a meeting of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in late 2010. (Photo By Tom…

Economy Apr 04

Can U.S. Product Makers Manufacture a Profit?

Paul Solman answers questions from NewsHour viewers and web users on business and economic news most days on his Making Sen$e page. Here's Monday's query: Name: Paul Menzel Question: I understand that it is more profitable for…

Economy Apr 01

Weekonomics: Our Friday Roundup

Today we initiate "Weekonomics," a Friday roundup of the week's economics news. No fooling. Simon Johnson starts us off with "lightning round" answers to questions on the banks, Europe, Japan and, because the monthly jobs data came out…

Economy Apr 01

March Unemployment: Barely Budging

One brief comment on the jobs numbers. The net addition of 216,000 jobs, from the so-called payroll survey, is respectable. But the "household survey" reports roughly the same number of unemployed Americans: 13.5 million. You can't tell a lot from…

Nation Mar 31

The Madness of Sports Betting: Economics Edition

Editor's Note | If you're one of the millions of Americans who filled out a college basketball national championship bracket this year, odds are you're out of luck. ESPN reports that only two brackets out of over 5.9…

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