Joe Guinan is the first Next System Speaker for 2025.

With this talk, Joe Guinan introduces the second edition of The Democracy Collaborative's Index of Systemic Trends. The Index reveals that the dashboard warning lights are blinking insistently across key indicators of economic, social and environmental performance, and our accompanying crisis of faith in democratic institutions and politics continues.

Joe Guinan is President of The Democracy Collaborative. His focus is on political economy, strategy, and economic system change, and he is co-author (with Martin O’Neill) of The Case for Community Wealth Building (Polity, 2020) and (with Christine Berry) of People Get Ready! Preparing for a Corbyn Government (O/R Books, 2019), which was named one of The Guardian’s best politics books of the year in 2019.

A former journalist, he was previously a program director at the Aspen Institute, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and a consultant to the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. Born in England with dual Irish and British citizenship, he grew up in British labor movement circles and was educated at Balliol College, Oxford.

Previously a researcher at The Democracy Collaborative at its inception at the University of Maryland, he has served in a number of capacities at the organization, including as vice president and as executive director of the Next System Project when it was launched in 2015.

He writes for an array of progressive outlets and is a frequently cited expert on the new economics in major news media. He lives in Washington, D.C.