The great conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke, who probably would not have been a reader of The American Prospect, once observed, You can never plan the future by the past. But when it comes to preparing the American workforce for the jobs of the future, we may be doing just that....

This paper reports on a pilot study of the use of conventional household survey methods to measure something unconventional: what we call offshorability, defined as the ability to perform one’s work duties (for the same employer and customers) from abroad. Notice that offshorability is a...

At the risk of sounding like a crass economist, I want to assert at the outset that one major purpose of the K-12 educational system is “vocational” in the broad sense. Specifically, the K-12 system is a mechanism for preparing cadres of 18-year-olds (many of whom will get some higher...

Central banks, which used to be so secretive, are communicating more and more these days about their monetary policy. This development has proceeded hand in glove with a burgeoning new scholarly literature on the subject. The empirical evidence, reviewed selectively here, suggests that...

My assignment is to survey the main questions swirling around monetary policy today. I emphasize three words in this sentence, each for a different reason. “Main” is because one person’s side issue is another’s main issue. So I had to be both selective and judgmental in compiling my...

One thing you should never predict is the future. That is generally sage advice, which I try to live by. Futurology is a loser’s game. Nonetheless, I am going to ignore this wise canon in this essay and throw caution to the wind. Why? Because one aspect of our economic future seems to me so...

Using detailed information on the nature of work done in over 800 BLS occupational codes, this paper ranks those occupations according to how easy/hard it is to offshore the work— either physically or electronically. Using that ranking, I estimate that somewhere between 22% and 29% of all U.S....

Alan Greenspan was sworn in as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System almost exactly 18 years ago. At the time, the Reagan administration was being rocked by the Iran-contra scandal. The Berlin Wall was standing tall while, in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev had...

A long tradition in economic theory models economic policy decisions as solutions to optimization problems solved by rational and well-informed agents: A single policymaker minimizes a loss function subject to some constraints. Another body of literature models policy decisions as if they were...

As the opening speaker, I may perhaps be permitted a short trip down memory lane. The trip is purposeful, and it will be mercifully short. While preparing my Marshall Lectures for delivery at Cambridge in 1995, I asked the Federal Reserve staff, for I was then Vice Chairman, to research what had...