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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

Economy Feb 25

The Economics of a World Run Riot

Are there any economic explanations for the world running riot, especially in North Africa? Maybe, says investment adviser Ed Yardeni, an otherwise pretty consistently conservative economist. He cites distinguished Brandeis University historian David Hackett Fischer and Fischer's 1996…

Economy Feb 24

Making Sen$e: Paying For Public Pensions

Editor's Note: As the fire over collective bargaining and public worker benefits burns across the country, on Thursday's broadcast we're looking at perhaps the issue behind it all: public pensions and how to pay for them. Our story…

Economy Feb 22

Tool$ Tuesday: You Cut the Deficit

As the President and Congress wrestle over the particulars of a trimmed-down federal budget, the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, funded by longtime budget nudge Pete Peterson, offers this tool for lowering the debt load…

Arts Feb 21

What Do Wisconsin Protests Say About Organized Labor?

Having begun my journalism career in college in the '60s, I figure I've been covering the labor movement for nearly half a century - a half century of relative decline. It's easy to understand in retrospect. After World…

Arts Feb 18

The Machine Breakers We Have Always With Us

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 today's query: A long and interesting email arrived recently from one Jean Maier.

Arts Feb 16

Merle Hazard and You: And the Winner Is…

We have an update on our country-country lyric contest, inspired by the econo-crooner Merle Hazard. Those of you who frequent these pages often will remember our series late last month where Merle lyricized about the financial crises in…

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