Michael Mandel holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard University. After teaching at New York University’s Stern School of Business, he moved to BusinessWeek in 1989, where he wrote about a wide range of topics, ranging from the economics of crime, to immigration, to health care, to technology, to the global economy. Mandel helped supervise BusinessWeek ’s domestic and global economic coverage while writing many of the magazine’s economic cover stories.

Mandel specializes in making complex economic concepts understandable, relevant, and exciting for a broad audience while emphasizing economic accuracy. He has won numerous awards, including the Economic Journalism Award from the Institute on Political Journalism, given to the writer “who has done the most to shape public opinion by giving the public a better understanding of economic theory and reality”; the Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious prize for economic and financial journalism; and the Economic Journalist of the Year Award from the World Leadership Forum. He was also named one of the top 100 business journalists of the 20th century.

Mandel is the author of several books, including Rational Exuberance: Silencing the Enemies of Growth and Why the Future is Better Than You Think. He also helped revise the 1995 edition of Paul Samuelson’s classic economics textbook. Economics: The Basics is Mandel’s first solo textbook.

Currently Mandel is a Senior Fellow at Wharton’s Mack Center for Technological Innovation. He also runs the news and education company Visible Economy LLC, which produces news videos about economic topics to accompany college textbooks. His blog, Mandel on Innovation and Growth, can be found at innovationandgrowth.wordpress.com. Mandel lives in Millburn, NJ, with his wife Judy and his two children, Elliot and Laura.