National Face Time for Austan Goolsbee

White House economist Austan Goolsbee recently appeared on the Colbert Show. He currently is serving under President Obama as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers and as staff director and chief economist of the going nowhere federal panel, the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board chaired by Paul Volcker.

There is zero to learn from this video about Obama economic policy, but it is interesting to note that Goolsbee received this face time just days after NYT did a Q & A with him. Somebody in the White House is promoting him and raising his profile for something. A replacement for Larry Summers, if Summers moves to the Fed?

From the NYT interview, we learn he is quite willing to tow the line on any nonsense coming out of the Obama Administration and he is verbally skillful at doing so.

As for his economic thinking, it appears he has no business cycle theory and admits that he is pretty much simply a data dog.

He is considered a member of the "New Social Economics" school of thought, along with Steven D. Levitt. I wonder if his thinking is more rigorous than the embarrassing effort put out by Levitt in the book Freakonomics.

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Austan Goolsbee
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