His first book, The Economists' Hour, was published in September 2019.[6][7] The book "traces the rise of the economists, first in the United States and then around the globe, as their ideas reshaped the modern world, curbing government, unleashing corporations and hastening globalization."[8]
Career
In 2007 Appelbaum was part of a team of reporters at The Charlotte Observer that helped shed light on the area's high rate of housing
foreclosures and questionable sales practices by
Beazer Homes USA, one of the United States' largest homebuilders. A profile of his reporting on the
subprime mortgage crisis described how, well before the nation knew about the coming crisis in mortgage lending, Appelbaum "noticed a strange pattern while compiling a list of foreclosed homes in North Carolina’s
Mecklenburg County—clusters were concentrated in new developments. Appelbaum wondered if faulty loans were behind the trend".[9]The Observer′s series led to FBI, IRS, SEC, and HUD investigations of Beazer Homes, which has since stopped making mortgage loans nationwide and stopped building homes in
Charlotte, North Carolina.[10][11][12]
"Beazer's crime wave might have gone on longer than it did, but for a North Carolina newspaper, The Charlotte Observer," wrote Floyd Norris of The New York Times.[13] The series won a
Gerald Loeb Award for Medium Newspapers,[14] a
George Polk Award and was a finalist for the 2008
Pulitzer Prize in public service.[15]
Appelbaum's November 8, 2018
tweet claiming the term '
gaslighting' was not an "actual English word" sent lookups for the word up 14,000% on Merriam-Webster.com, putting it on their list of trending terms.[16]