*Yellen*

The author is Jon Hilsenrath, and the subtitle is The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval.  I very much enjoyed this book and read it straight through without stopping, and so I am happy to recommend it heartily.  Most of all it is a wonderful account of the economics profession and its evolution over the last few decades.

But we are here to be honest, right?  I came away from the book with the impression that Yellen (whom, to be clear, I never have interacted with) is not all that interesting, and that the book worked because it was enlivened with other more colorful characters.  Excerpt:

Yellen’s lectures had a slow, steady cadence.  Her answers to student questions were always detailed, thought-out, and sometimes exhausting.  She had a tendency to analyze questions from every possible angle.  She differed from Tobin in one respect: where he was uniformly serious, she had a light side, one that included a disarming belly laugh that rose inside her and could stream out in tears and howls over drinks with the graduate students she was teaching.

One of her students in macroeconomics was a rising star in the field, a young man named Lawrence Summers…He didn’t stand out in Yellen’s class, perhaps because he already knew the material so well and didn’t see much to challenge or question in her carefully prepared presentations.

This part I found informative:

Elite visitors sometimes got the toughest treatment.  Fischer Black, a mathematician whose theories about asset prices and stock options sparked wave of Wall Street innovation, visited in the early 1970s to challenge Friedman’s ideas about money and inflation.  Friedman introduced Black by saying, “We all know that the paper is wrong.”  We have two hours to work out why it is wrong.”

I very much hope there will be more books like this, definitely recommended.  You can buy it here.