The Quants in the Room How Much Power Do Economists Really Have? - Jason Furman

July/August 2022, Opinion: "In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century, joined the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, which had been created a decade and a half earlier to provide impartial economic analysis to the president. John F. Kennedy had recently won the White House, and the Democratic Party was engaged in a debate about whether and how to expand access to health insurance. It was a discussion in which Arrow was well positioned to participate. Arrow was an expert on market behavior and failures, and the next year, he would publish a landmark paper in the American Economic Review that established the discipline of health economics. It argued that the health-care market was riddled with bad information and bargaining power asymmetries that made fair pricing extraordinarily difficult: a foundational idea that has since shaped how health-care experts think about their field." Read Via Foreign Affairs

HKS Faculty Author - Jason Furman