Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper

I am currently the managing editor at The American Prospect. I wrote a book called How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics.

📍 Philadelphia

The Senseless Post-2008 Lost Decade

Hello again! After the 2008 crisis, America suffered over a decade of high unemployment and weak growth. In my latest video project (delivered in an off-the-cuff live recording, which it turns out is dramatically easier to do), I explain how this could have been avoided: Last week at the Prospect

New Zealand Report

Apologies for radio silence, I've been on honeymoon for the last couple weeks in New Zealand. It's an interesting country, much more similar to the United States than I was expecting. There are big highways built right through the middle of Auckland (the largest city), which is also extremely sprawly.

The Crypto 2008 Speedrun

Howdy folks, I finally finished a video after taking many months off. (These things are fun to make but man they are a lot of work.) It's all about Sam Bankman-Fried, the ongoing crypto collapse, and how all these jokers have recapitulated the 2008 financial crisis in less than five

The Best Tax System on Earth Is in the Remote North Atlantic

Back in October I spent a week in the Faroe Islands reporting on their tax system, called TAKS. I interviewed the head of the tax authority, some government ministers, several academics, and a bunch of other folks. I discovered not only that TAKS keeps continuous track of all normal employment

RIP Twitter. What's Next?

I wondered what Elon Musk would do to that place, but to be honest I did not remotely expect that he would tank it as quickly as he appears to be doing. He's fired half the staff in one week, including many critical security and stability workers. Musk's fan base

On Policing

What do we do with the police? Despite efforts from both liberals and conservatives to bury the George Floyd movement, there's a new story of police brutality virtually every day, and the question keeps bubbling. I've been meaning to set down some basic thoughts on the question, and some tweets

Will No One Defend the American Republic?

In a previous newsletter, I frankly discussed my view that the United States is careening towards a right-wing dictatorship that is highly likely to be either deranged or unstable or both over the medium term, thus threatening a chaotic collapse of the global economic system that might kill billions (especially

This Bloody Nightmare

A short newsletter this time, because I am going on vacation for two weeks to get married starting tomorrow, and also because I imagine like most readers I have been emotionally gutted by the school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. I don't think I will ever forget this

These Are the Stakes

I've been listening to the British History Podcast [https://www.thebritishhistorypodcast.com/] by Jamie Jeffers, which is a pretty good pop history-type series that really digs deep into the material—after 390 episodes it's just getting to the Norman conquest. So far I'm just getting into the Anglo-Saxon period after

Newsletter reboot

Apologies for the prolonged radio silence, as you may have seen I recently started a new job at The American Prospect. It turns out being managing editor of a print magazine is a ton of work involving a lot of things I hadn't done in nearly a decade. For the