Hillary Clinton's Top Economist is an Interventionist on Steroids

Heather Boushey

Tyler Cowen is out with a profile at Bloomberg on  Heather Boushey, the chief economist of Hillary Clinton's transition team.

As alway,s you have to read between the lines of Cowen's pieces but it is very much worth the effort in this case. Cowen, correctly, thinks Boushey is off the wall bonkers.

From the Cowen essay:

This is a thoughtful and intelligent book, but for my taste Boushey holds too much faith in mandated and centralized solutions.
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Boushey doesn’t estimate or indicate the expense of her proposed mandatory benefits, although she does suggest on page 1 that the cost would be “very small.” She is developing a new kind of supply-side economics, this time on the left, but like her right-wing counterparts she is running the risk of excess optimism about how much her suggested improvements will boost productivity in the system.
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The most plausible response to these criticisms is that individual Americans cannot be trusted to make good decisions for themselves, and I am afraid that is the view being swept under the carpet here.

At a blog post, though, Cowen does seem to note an important positive:

She is also the chief economist for Hillary Clinton’s transition team, and I would trust her with nuclear weapons.

The fascinating and important profile is here.

 -RW