Christina Romer, of UC Berkeley, has been appointed to Chair President Elect Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. Romer wrote, if not the book, at least the chapter for Encyclopedia Britannica, The Great Depression. News of her appointment should make liberals and women who opposed the appointment of Lawrence Summers, who many predicted (including today's Wall Street Journal) would get this job, somewhat happy, though it looks like Summers will be named White House economic director.
Professor Romer and her husband David were both advisers to the Obama campaign and they hold two seats on the committee which decides when the U.S is officially in a recession.
The Romers are macroeconomists, who study the big picture in economics. They've also studied the way tax cuts affect the economy and government spending. A UC Berkeley article reported,
What they found about both issues surprised them. Tax cuts provide powerful short-run stimulus to the economy, but there is little evidence that tax cuts restrain government spending.
"It turns out," Christina explains, "that tax cuts have led, eventually, to tax increases. Basically, something has to give. What we thought gave when you cut taxes was spending, but we seem to find that in postwar U.S. history what actually gives is the tax cut itself. A substantial fraction of a tax cut is typically undone in the subsequent five years."
The appointment may telegraph Obama's intentions regarding Fed Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke. Romers wrote a paper, Choosing the Federal Reserve Chair: Lessons from History. Like Bernanke, she has a history of a connection to Princeton University, where she was an assistant professor from 1985-1988.
Romer graduated from College of William and Mary in 1981 and from M.I.T., with a Ph.D., in 1985. In 1994, she co-authored, with her husband, a paper, "What Ends Recessions?"
It's clear, Obama is appointing someone smart, with strong academic credentials. Unlike Treasury Secretary appointee Geither, who is overflowing with experience, Romer is an academic who's specialized in "getting" the big picture.
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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)