2025-05-30
1 小时 2 分钟I first met the economist Austin Goolsbee around 20 years ago.
I was out at the University of Chicago spending time with another Chicago economist,
Steve Levitt, who would become my Freakonomics friend and co-author.
Levitt could be shy and soft-spoken.
Goolsbee was neither.
He was a former debate champion.
He had done improvisational comedy.
In fact, Goolsbee did a lot of things that most economics professors didn't do.
I guess I didn't see him as a heavyweight, exactly.
If you had told me back then that Goolsbee would go on to run the Council of Economic Advisors in the Obama White House,
which he did,
and that he would become president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago,
which is his current job, I would have thought you had the wrong guy.
But plainly, I'm the one who was wrong.
Goolsbee has always been considered a top-tier academic researcher and professor.
Temperamentally, he's a hardcore empiricist, but he also has strong opinions.
And so, as the Trump White House embarks on an aggressive overhaul of economic policy,
I thought it might be a good idea to speak with someone from the Federal Reserve,
and I suspected that Goolsbee might be very good.
This time, I wasn't wrong, as you'll hear on today's show.