Among the most notable, but least discussed, hallmarks of what I have called the quiet revolution in central banking practice (Blinder, 2004a) has been the movement toward making monetary policy decisions by committee. Until about a decade ago, most central banks had a single governor, who might...

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...

I was Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board while I was preparing my Marshall Lectures for delivery at Cambridge in 1995. So I asked the Board staff to research what had been written about making monetary policy by committees—as opposed to by individuals. Although they were (and remain) a...

Times change. When I was introduced to macroeconomics as a Princeton University freshman in 1963, fiscal policy and by that I mean discretionary fiscal stabilization policy was all the rage. The policy idea that would eventually become the Kennedy- Johnson tax cuts was the new, new thing. In...

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....

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....

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...

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...

George Stigler, the Nobel prize winner in economics in 1982, once wrote that economists exert a minor and scarcely detectable influence on the societies in which they live. It’s not a proposition that Don Patinkin, who trained several generations of “Patinkin boys” and had quite an...

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...