Yuri Gripas/Sipa USA via AP Images
Jared Bernstein speaks at a press briefing at the White House in Washington, July 18, 2022.
Jared Bernstein has his confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee today to chair President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, succeeding Cecilia Rouse. As a member of the three-person council since 2021, now elevated to chair, Bernstein has already been a key progressive adviser to the president. And he’s now needed more than ever.
With the departure of White House chief of staff Ron Klain and National Economic Council director Brian Deese, who have been succeeded by somewhat more centrist figures in Jeff Zients and Lael Brainard, respectively, Bernstein becomes the indispensable senior progressive in the room where it happens.
His close personal relationship with Biden dates back to when Bernstein was the token progressive on a mostly neoliberal Obama senior economic team. His title was the vice president’s chief economist.
Several traits make Bernstein exceptional. He is not only a meticulously fine technical economist with a facility for explaining in compelling lay language market failures and the case for regulation and social investment. He is also a sweetheart of a human being who wins respect across the aisle.
In this era of bitterly polarized partisanship, with conservative economists still committed to a free-market paradigm that keeps being contradicted by reality, several senior Republican economists recently signed a letter urging the Senate to confirm Bernstein. The letter was organized by Kevin Hassett, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Trump.
I know of no precedent for this kind of letter, much less for a Democratic nominee who is a resolute progressive.
Several former Republican chairs of the council signed the letter of support. These included Michael Boskin, who headed the council under President George H.W. Bush, and three chairs under President George W. Bush: Ben Bernanke, Glenn Hubbard, and N. Gregory Mankiw, the latter being an unreconstructed Chicago school conservative.
I know of no precedent for this kind of letter, much less for a Democratic nominee who is a resolute progressive. Hassett and Bernstein worked together on the plan to give special tax credits to economic development investments in so-called opportunity zones located in high-poverty areas. The plan was included in Trump’s 2017 tax legislation.
Bernstein was well aware that the tax-credit scheme could be gamed and that there were far better ways to help the poor. But under the circumstances, it was an attainable half-a-loaf, in an otherwise retrograde tax bill. Classic Bernstein.
Hassett told The New York Times, “I disagree with Jared about a lot, and Jared and I have been disagreeing about things for 20 years. But he really is a fundamentally good person who tries to figure things out with an open mind, and who changes his mind.” Nearly everyone who has crossed paths with Bernstein would likely agree.
Before joining Vice President Biden’s staff under Obama, Bernstein was a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. His skill at making the case for progressive economics to a wide audience led Bernstein to be the public face of EPI; he was all over cable TV and in the op-ed pages. Without taking anything away from EPI’s pathbreaking research in its early years, Bernstein’s role as EPI spokesperson helped put the fledgling think tank on the media map.
To get a deeper sense of just how good Bernstein is, you should read the 2023 Economic Report of the President, released last month, which reflects the work of Bernstein, fellow council member Heather Boushey, and senior staffers. The 303-page report is a book-length tour of the economic horizon, politely debunking neoliberal myths, and making a technically unimpeachable case for what is basically a social-democratic economics.
The discussion of climate change, public investment, and the economy is sublime. Likewise the analysis of wage-setting, monopoly, financial risks of deregulation, cryptocurrencies, digital markets and AI, trade and industrial policy, inflation, and a good deal more. It’s the best book on the economy that I’ve read this year.
For the first time in a long professional life of criticizing perverse economic policies of Republican and Democratic presidents alike, from trade to taxes to deregulation, I find literally nothing in the 2023 report with which I disagree, and it has taught me a lot. As a Jewish prayer puts it, I thank the Almighty for being allowed to reach this day.
And as one who has been an economic writer and critic without a Ph.D. in economics, it charms me that Jared Bernstein’s doctorate from Columbia is from the school of social work, where he studied social welfare policy, not from the economics department. That probably saved him from a lifetime of sterile modeling in favor of inquiry into the real economy.
Bernstein is in interesting company. Neither Leon Keyserling, Harry Truman’s great second chair of the council, nor Alan Greenspan (!), chair under Gerald Ford, had doctorates in economics. (After he became a conservative celebrity, Greenspan, always crafty, was later awarded one retroactively for previous work.)
Even Bernstein’s detractors, if he has any, would consider him a real economist. It has to give us some hope that Biden can appoint such good progressives to senior posts—and that even in this toxic political environment there are islands of shared decency.
