About the Author

A long time ago now, I was driving past some old shacks in rural Virginia, in the western part of the state, and I wondered how the people in them were living. And suddenly it hit me. I wanted to find out, and I wanted to write about it. I wanted to be a writer. So starting in that moment, I took steps to do just that. I started freelance writing, and eventually went to Columbia Journalism School, and then I became a newspaper reporter. I became a journalist, a profession that suits me because my inquiring nature is an asset rather than a liability, which it had been before then. I'm still a journalist, still a writer, though I don't work for a daily newspaper anymore. I still am trying to figure out how the world works, and tell about it. I have a perhaps a naive belief that if people understand how the world works, they will seek to use that information to make it better. Some basic bio information about me. I'm the author of three books, the latest being The Surprising Design of Market Economies, which is my opus of sorts. I'm a native of Norfolk, Virginia, being born there on May 7, 1959. I live in Brooklyn now. Before addressing economies, I wrote a lot about urban planning, which explains why I'm a Senior Fellow at the Regional Plan Association, an esteemed urban planning group in New York City. I still write a lot about urban planning.