Everything we publish, newest first. Browse by year or by subject: business, the economy, health care, politics, society, and world affairs. Each piece runs under the date it was written and is left as written. If a prediction missed, the miss stays on the page.
Correspondents’ Forum
Each session we put a single question to our correspondents and publish their answers in full. The question is the same for everyone. The answers rarely are. Read them side by side: the disagreement between a port logistics manager in Jacksonville and an engineer in Knoxville is often more useful than the consensus of a panel.
Subject categories
- Business: Commentary on the firms, owners, and regulators that decide what gets built, and who carries the risk when it fails.
- Economy: Commentary on growth, debt, prices, and the distance between the official figures and the household budget.
- Health Care: Commentary on cost, access, and who actually pays.
- Politics: Commentary on power, elections, and the institutions that are supposed to answer to the public.
- Society: Commentary on the habits, institutions, and arguments that hold communities together or pull them apart.
- World Affairs: Commentary on alliances, trade, and conflict, and what they cost the people who live with the results.
Why We Don’t Name Our Correspondents
We have never published the names or photographs of our correspondents, and we have never filmed the Symposium or the Summits. That is a choice, and we owe readers the reason for it.
Our correspondents are ordinary working people. They have employers, customers, neighbors, and children in local schools. In a country where an unpopular opinion can cost someone a job or a client, asking them to sign their names would mean hearing only from people with nothing to lose. We would rather hear from the freight manager and the insurance agent than from the professional commentator who can afford the heat.
The same reasoning keeps cameras out of the room. People argue differently when they know a clip of their worst sentence can travel without the rest of the paragraph. Without cameras, they can test an idea, concede a point, and change their minds, which is the whole purpose of sitting down together.
The practice is not new. The Federalist Papers ran under the name Publius. Many serious publications still run unsigned work, so that readers judge the argument rather than the author.
That does not mean no one answers for the work. Each correspondent writes from a real place and a real trade, described on this page, and the steward of Thinking Outside the Boxe signs his name to what we publish and answers for it. Judge the arguments on their merits. That is what they are here for.
