MeatyREADS

Austan Goolsbee

August 21, 2008 – 6:08 pm by BH

Profiled in MIT’s Technology Review (HT). The article contains a funny description of how Goolsbee and Obama met:

“Obama opened the door, looked at me in bafflement, and said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, I’m Professor Goolsbee. Obama said, ‘You can’t be.’” He’d been expecting an older tweed-jacketed academic, not–as Goolsbee claims Obama phrased it–another skinny, tall, youthful, geeky guy with big ears and a funny name.

The article correctly points out that the current crop of economists are “quite unlike the free-market-fundamentalist followers of Milton Friedman who made the university famous in the last century.” I get tired of reading about how Senator Obama is being advised by a bunch of right-wing Friedman types. The Chicago School of Economics reflected a period in time and that time is mostly over.

Here’s an interview with Goolsbee on Charlie Rose.