About Making Sen$e with Paul Solman

Paul Solman has been business, economics and occasional art correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer since 1985.

A graduate of Brandeis University (1966), where he was editor of the school newspaper, “The Justice,” Solman became founding editor of the alternative Boston weekly The Real Paper in 1972. He began his career in business journalism as a Nieman Fellow, joining the Harvard Business school MBA class of 1977-8, embarking on a career as a business reporter at WGBH Boston immediately thereafter. He was the co-originator and executive editor of PBS’s business documentary series, ENTERPRISE, several years later.

In the 1980s, Solman also served on the Harvard Business School faculty, teaching media, finance and business history in the Advanced Management Program. He co-authored a better-than-average-seller, Life and Death on the Corporate Battlefield (1983), which appeared in Japanese, German and a pirated Taiwanese edition. With sociologist Morrie Schwartz, he helped create — and wrote the introduction to — the book “Morrie: In His Own Words,” which preceded “Tuesdays with Morrie” but failed to outsell it by several orders of magnitude.

Solman lectures on college campuses and has written for numerous publications, including the Journal of Economic Education and both Forbes and Mother Jones magazines; he was for years East Coast editor of the latter. A one-time cab driver, kindergarten teacher, crafts store owner and management consultant, Paul is also the author and presenter of “Discovering Economics with Paul Solman,” a series of videos distributed by McGraw-Hill to accompany the company’s introductory economics textbooks. Recently, he became Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Political Economy at Yale, where he helps teach the university’s Grand Strategy course and is slated to launch his own seminar, “Economic Grand Strategies: From Chimps to Champs? Or Chumps?” He is also part of a national consortium to teach “Financial Literacy” to Americans at every educational level, from grade to grad school.

Paul is married with children. And grandchildren.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic nonprofit institution, was established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then President and Chief Executive Officer of the General Motors Corporation. It makes grants primarily to support original research and broad-based education related to science, technology, economic performance and the quality of American life.