The Case Against Cynicism

Zachary Karabell is an author, commentator, and the founder of the Progress Network at New America. He is also president of River Twice Capital, Chairman of the Institute for Global Affairs at Eurasia Group, and the majority owner of Mine Hill Distillery. Previously, he was Head of Global Strategies at Envestnet, a financial services firm, and before that President of Fred Alger & Company, where he was portfolio manager of the China-U.S. Growth Fund and Chief Economist. He also managed the River Twice Fund, an alternative investment fund focused on sustainability.

Educated at Columbia, Oxford, and Harvard—where he received his Ph.D.—Karabell has taught at Harvard and Dartmouth and has written extensively on history, economics, and international relations. He is currently at work on a history of corn for Penguin Press, which illuminates humanity’s capacity to solve large-scale challenges via innovation and technology. He is the author of 12 previous books, including Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power; The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers That Rule Our World; Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian and Jewish Coexistence; and The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election.

Karabell writes “The Edgy Optimist” column on Substack, which previously appeared on Slate, Reuters, and The Atlantic. A former columnist for Time and now a regular opinion writer for The Washington Post, he is a contributing editor for Politico and a frequent commentator across television and print, with frequent appearances on CNBC, Fox Business, and MSNBC. He has written for a wide variety of publications including The New York Times, Wired, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, The Wall Street
Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs. He serves on the boards of Heyday Books and PEN America, and in 2003 was named a “Global Leader for Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum.