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A review by jasonfurman
Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval by Jon Hilsenrath
5.0
A fantastic biography of an amazing economist and policymaker--also serving as a dual biography of Janet Yellen's Nobel-prize winning husband George Akerlof and their son the economist Robert Akerlof. Jon Hilsenrath's biography provides a marvelous blend of personal stories, economic ideas, broader economic context, and policymaking. The book gives you a window into the evolution of ideas, how those ideas do--and do not--interact with policymaking, and the broader economic context of the U.S. economy from the roaring 1990s through the financial crisis and then the COVID crisis. All of which is the result of work by humans--that Hilsenrath does a terrific job humanizing.
I knew the broad contours of the story already: growing up in Brooklyn, PhD under James Tobin at Yale, going to Harvard, not getting tenure, meeting George Akerlof and starting an incredibly fruitful intellectual partnership, then moving on to become Governor of the Federal Reserve, CEA Chair, President of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, Vice Chair of the Fed, Chair of the Fed, and now Treasury Secretary (writing even this long sentence is exhausting to me). I worked for Yellen in one of these roles (CEA Chair) and to some degree with her in others (the Fed). I also read and was excited about a number of the papers she wrote with Akerlof, and also Akerlof's other work (which gets a lot of attention in the book). And, full disclosure, I also talked to Hilsenrath for the book.
But the book still provided an enormous amount of vivid and insightful connections between all of these lines on a resume, especially the ferment in economics as economists trained and working at places like Harvard, Yale, MIT and Berkeley tried to develop ideas that in part responded to the Chicago critique of Keynesian economics and partly went beyond it by developing economic theories in which people had incomplete information or even, shudder the thought, feeling an acted like humans. Hilsenrath does a great job weaving the roles of many others into this intellectual history: including Stiglitz, Shiller, Summers and Shleifer to just list some of the economists beginning with the letter S who get mini bios and intellectual summaries.
It is also interesting to read about Akerlof developing theories on financial instability at the same time that Yellen is in charge of regulating some of the major banks--and how his ideas and her policymaking did and did not inform and agree with each other.
Overall, I loved the book--and I suspect that people who come to it with less background might get even more out of this insightful window into the interplay of policymaking and economic ideas.
I knew the broad contours of the story already: growing up in Brooklyn, PhD under James Tobin at Yale, going to Harvard, not getting tenure, meeting George Akerlof and starting an incredibly fruitful intellectual partnership, then moving on to become Governor of the Federal Reserve, CEA Chair, President of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, Vice Chair of the Fed, Chair of the Fed, and now Treasury Secretary (writing even this long sentence is exhausting to me). I worked for Yellen in one of these roles (CEA Chair) and to some degree with her in others (the Fed). I also read and was excited about a number of the papers she wrote with Akerlof, and also Akerlof's other work (which gets a lot of attention in the book). And, full disclosure, I also talked to Hilsenrath for the book.
But the book still provided an enormous amount of vivid and insightful connections between all of these lines on a resume, especially the ferment in economics as economists trained and working at places like Harvard, Yale, MIT and Berkeley tried to develop ideas that in part responded to the Chicago critique of Keynesian economics and partly went beyond it by developing economic theories in which people had incomplete information or even, shudder the thought, feeling an acted like humans. Hilsenrath does a great job weaving the roles of many others into this intellectual history: including Stiglitz, Shiller, Summers and Shleifer to just list some of the economists beginning with the letter S who get mini bios and intellectual summaries.
It is also interesting to read about Akerlof developing theories on financial instability at the same time that Yellen is in charge of regulating some of the major banks--and how his ideas and her policymaking did and did not inform and agree with each other.
Overall, I loved the book--and I suspect that people who come to it with less background might get even more out of this insightful window into the interplay of policymaking and economic ideas.