The smartest economist you’ve never heard of published by The Washington Post (10/2010).
“ILE DE RE, France — When David Lipton, a promising economist, was finishing his graduate work at Harvard in the early 1980s, he faced one of those potentially life-changing choices. He had one job offer from the International Monetary Fund in Washington, the multinational institution that for 70 years has served as a lender of last resort and dispenser of orthodox economic advice to countries that get into financial trouble. There was also an offer of a teaching job from the University of Virginia. Unsure of which path to take, he turned for advice to an intellectually restless and charismatic assistant professor, a Frenchman named Olivier Blanchard.
Blanchard’s terse advice: “David, if you go to the IMF, you’ll be throwing your career away.”
Life, however, takes unexpected turns. On Oct. 1, the same intellectually restless and charismatic Blanchard stepped down as the IMF’s top economist after seven tumultuous years that included the worst financial crisis in a generation, a global recession, a three-act Greek tragedy and the near-collapse of the euro. Over his two terms, Blanchard helped wean the Fund off its obsessions with low inflation, fiscal austerity and unregulated flows of capital, resurrecting the economics of John Maynard Keynes at an institution that the great British economist had helped to create but where more recently he had fallen out of favor…”
