Friday, September 10, 2010

"Obama to name Goolsbee to head economic council" and "Who is Austan Goolsbee"

A quick side note. We have links stored all over the place, about 400,000 of them.
Be thankful they didn't make it onto the blog!
200,000 or so are stored on Google's servers (not really servers, they use PC's hooked up both in series and in parallel).
Late last year the Goog emailed and said we were using a lot of their storage capacity and would it be okay if they bundled them all into an HTML email and deleted them?
My favorite tech guy, Siva, a streetwise Hindu boy (Caltech post-doc) convinced them that we would stop adding and start deleting, ourselves.
Below are some of our more interesting links on the new nominee head of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.
We get to delete some of the bookmarks while at the same time using Google's storage (they own this Blogspot platform). 199,994 to go!
Don't tell the Goog.

From the Washington Post:
President Obama will name Austan Goolsbee, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, to succeed Christina Romer as the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, according to senior administration officials.

Obama has long looked to Goolsbee, a 41-year-old liberal economist whose academic research is focused on the new economy, government policy, taxes and technology, for guidance about economic issues. Goolsbee was an economic adviser to Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and 2004 Senate run.
The announcement is expected to come at Obama's news conference Friday morning, said the sources, who asked to remain anonymous because it has not yet been released publicly.

The selection of Goolsbee, who is already one of three economists on the advisory panel, signaled confidence by Obama in his current economic team despite criticism by some members of Congress. House Republican leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) last month called for the firing of key economic officials because he said they have failed to revive the economy.

With the departure of Romer, who will return to the University of California at Berkeley this month, and budget director Peter Orszag earlier, Obama had the opportunity to radically change his inner circle of advisers. Instead, he chose continuity. To replace Orszag, Obama selected Jack Lew, who was a deputy secretary of state and a budget director for former President Bill Clinton. Lew is awaiting confirmation....MORE
From Real Time Economics:
President Barack Obama’s choice of Austan Goolsbee to succeed Christina Romer as the head of the Council of Economic Advisers represents a change of personality at the top of the board, if not a shift in policy.

Associated Press
Austan Goolsbee
Goolsbee, a Yale graduate with a Ph.D. from MIT currently on leave from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, has been advising Obama since the two met during the president’s 2004 Senate run. He has worked in the CEA under Romer since the administration took office and has been a visible face of the White House on the economic front. Having already been backed by the Senate for his spot on the council, his appointment won’t have to be vetted by lawmakers.

According to his bio for the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board on which he’s served as chief economist,, his academic work focuses on the new economy, government policy, taxes, and technology. To be more specific, he was doing leading work on the Internet when e-commerce was still in its infancy and wrote  a leading paper on taxes and the Web.

Despite his pedigree from the historically conservative University of Chicago, Republicans aren’t likely to cheer his stance on taxes. During the 2008 presidential campaign he strongly backed the president’s plan to increase taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year. Meanwhile, much of his academic research has attempted to counter arguments that  tax cuts pay for themselves and that  raising taxes on high-income individuals reduces long-term government revenue....MORE
From the link-vault:

Charlie Rose interviews Austan Goolsbee
Goolsbee 1-0 Salmon
Austan Goolsbee is Brilliant, But is He Right?
White House Economist Austan Goolsbee Answers Your Questions at Freakonomics
Austan Goolsbee, Stand-Up Economist at Real Time Economics, Oct. 2009
We knew White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee was funny, but last night the longtime member of President Barack Obama’s team was named Washington’s funniest celebrity.
In a routine (via Politico) that borrowed its structure from Kevin Nealon’s old Mr. Subliminal character from Saturday Night Live, Goolsbee had the audience rolling in the aisles. The bit takes a seemingly straightforward speech and inserts sarcastic asides.

“When we took office it was an all-star team of economists and we basically knew what to do — panic … Let’s just sort it out and start from the fundamentals – how do we throw money at this problem — And the thing is most of the lessons aren’t recent. It’s been a long, long time since things were this bad. So we kind of had to go back and look at the old textbooks — Karl Marx, Trotsky,” Goolsbee joked.
Of course, some of the targets, including Sen. Ben Nelson, bank CEOs, Sarah Palin and Fox News correspondents, might not find the material as amusing as the audience, and Goolsbee made a note of it in his closing:

“Have some sympathy for those people that are unemployed because when Rahm Emanuel sees my comments from this evening I am going to be one of them.”