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Mark Paul, a former senior scholar with the California program at the New America Foundation, is a leading expert on California policy and politics, with three decades of varied experience as a journalist, policy thinker, and state official. He is the co-author, with Joe Mathews, of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How It Can Be Fixed, (University of California Press, June 2010), and is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.

Mr. Paul was formerly national editor and editorial page editor of the Oakland Tribune and deputy editorial page editor and columnist at the Sacramento Bee, where he won the 2000 Best in the West award for his editorials.

In 2004 Mr. Paul was appointed deputy treasurer of the state of California. He served as policy director for the treasurer’s office and executive secretary of the state’s Pooled Money Investment Board, which manages the cash reserves of state and local governments. He also oversaw the operations of the state’s financing authorities for health and pollution control facilities. He left the treasurer’s office in 2006 to become policy director for Angelides 2006, the California gubernatorial campaign of Phil Angelides. 

At New America since 2007, he has consulted with elected officials and citizen groups and written and spoken widely around the state on budget policy, tax reform, infrastructure finance, asset building, and the need for fundamental revisions in the state constitution. His recent work on California issues has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee, and The American Interest, and in leading California blogs, including Calbuzz, California Progress Report, and Blockbuster Democracy. He is co-author, with Micah Weinberg, of “Remapping the California Electorate,” in R. Jeffrey Lustig, ed., Remaking California: Reclaiming the Public Good (Heyday Books: 2010). An earlier version of the paper earned them the 2009 award for best contribution to electoral reform from Californians for Electoral Reform.

Born and raised mostly in the Midwest, Mr. Paul graduated with B.A. in history from Stanford University in 1970 and earned a Master’s degree in U.S. history at Stanford in 1971. He has been a visiting lecturer in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, where he taught international relations and the history of the Cold War, and a visiting instructor at Stanford, where he taught 20th century U.S. history. He is the author of “Diplomacy Delayed: The Atomic Bomb and the Division of Korea, 1945,” in Child of Conflict: The Korean-American Relationship, 1945-53, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983). He lives with his wife and son in Sacramento, California.