M-RCBG Senior Fellow-Led Study Group: Jeffrey Fuhrer
The Broken Economy: The Role of Narratives
Thursday, March 3 , 4:00-5:00
Register for the online Study Group HERE
(**Please register using your Harvard.edu email address)
The workshop will briefly discusses measures of economic “brokenness,” and then discuss a number of key narratives that have played two roles in causing these results. First, narratives such as the primacy of individual effort in achieving success are used to justify poor outcomes (they’re the result of laziness). Second, the same narratives have been used to determine tax and safety net policy so as to minimize aid to the poor. Throughout, the narrative of the post-racial economy has been used to deny opportunity to families of color to build financial and human capital. The workshop will present data bearing on these points, and leave plenty of time for discussion.
Jeffrey (Jeff) Fuhrer was Executive Vice President and Senior Policy Advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston until stepping down at the start of 2020. He oversaw and then served as an advisor to the Bank’s regional and community outreach department and was responsible for the Bank’s diversity and inclusion functions. He has been an associate economist of the Federal Open Market Committee, and regularly attended this key U.S. policymaking meeting with the Bank’s president. In June 1992 he joined the Bank’s research department as an assistant vice president and economist, and from 1995–2001 headed its Open Economy Macro/International section. In 2000 Fuhrer was named senior vice president and monetary policy advisor, in 2001 he became director of research, and in 2006 he was named executive vice president. Fuhrer began his career at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, first as a research assistant, and then in 1985 returned as a senior economist after earning his doctorate. He has been active in economic research for more than three decades and has served as an associate editor for the American Economic Review. Fuhrer has published numerous scholarly papers on the interactions among monetary policy, inflation, consumer spending, and asset prices. He has been married for 39 years and has three grown children. Fuhrer earned an A.B. in economics with highest honors from Princeton University, and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. While at HKS, Jeff Fuhrer will pursue a research project, Issues in Monetary Policy Framework Design. His faculty sponsor is Karen Dynan, Professor of the Practice in the Department of Economics at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. His email is: jeffrey_fuhrer@hks.harvard.edu