Austan Goolsbee on Central Banking as a Data Dog
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2025
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
Austan Goolsbee is one of Tyler Cowen’s favorite economists—not because they always agree, but because Goolsbee embodies what it means to think like an economist. Whether he’s analyzing productivity slowdowns in the construction sector, exploring the impact of taxes on digital commerce, or poking holes in overconfident macro narratives, Goolsbee is consistently sharp, skeptical, and curious. A longtime professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, Goolsbee now brings that intellectual discipline—and a healthy dose of humor—to his role as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
Tyler and Austan explore what theoretical frameworks Goolsbee uses for understanding inflation, why he’s skeptical of monetary policy rules, whether post-pandemic inflation was mostly from the demand or supply side, the proliferation of stablecoins and shadow banking, housing prices and construction productivity, how microeconomic principles apply to managing a regional Fed bank, whether the structure of the Federal Reserve system should change, AI's role in banking supervision and economic forecasting, stablecoins and CBDCs, AI's productivity potential over the coming decades, his secret to beating Ted Cruz in college debates, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded March 3rd, 2025.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:09.4 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. |
| 0:13.5 | Learn more at Mercadis.org. |
| 0:15.7 | For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, |
| 0:20.4 | visit Conversationswithtyler.com. |
| 0:28.0 | Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. |
| 0:32.1 | Today, I'm very happy to be chatting with Austin Gulsby. |
| 0:35.8 | Austin is one of my favorite economists. He always thinks |
| 0:39.2 | like an economist, is how I would put it. He has had a longstanding teaching post at the University |
| 0:45.2 | of Chicago, served in the Obama administration, and now is president of the Chicago Fed. |
| 0:51.7 | Austin, welcome. Tyler, thank you for having me, and what a treat for me this is. |
| 0:56.5 | I really appreciate it. What is it in academic macroeconomics or just economics that you found |
| 1:03.8 | surprisingly useful being a Fed president? I was a data guy, as you know, in the field of economics. |
| 1:12.6 | And as soon as I got there, there's all this pressure of from the press and from others, |
| 1:18.3 | are you a dove, are you a hawk? |
| 1:19.9 | And I used to say, look, I'm not one of the birds. |
| 1:23.0 | I'm in the data dogs. |
| 1:24.7 | You know, and the first rule of the data dogs is, is there's a time for walking |
| 1:30.9 | and a time for sniffing and knowing the difference between those. And I would say that |
| 1:37.8 | discipline of academic economics getting into the data is super useful. And then we're used to thinking about |
| 1:46.8 | causality and identification. And I do think we could use a little more of that in the macro |
| 1:54.3 | context. But say you're trying to figure out the connection between the money supply and the rate |
... |
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