Biden’s New Top Economist Has a Longtime Focus on Workers

Ms. Rouse, who received her bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, is currently the dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. She emphasized her interest in workers, and what hurts them and holds them back, at an introductory event on Tuesday with Mr. Biden and other nominees for economic posts in his administration. She said her mother, a school psychologist, had encouraged her to take an economics course as a freshman in college, which came during a national spike in unemployment.

“It was impossible to separate what we were learning in the classroom from what I knew was going on in towns across the country,” Ms. Rouse said, “and I found myself drawn to study the labor market in all of its dimensions — the reasons that jobs disappear, the impact of education on people’s job prospects, the ways we can tear down barriers to job growth and make it easier for people to find long-lasting economic security.”

Ms. Rouse will be a pioneer if confirmed — the first Black chair of the council. And she will take her position during a sagging recovery from a pandemic recession, at a time when millions of Americans have been out of work for months since the virus first surged through the United States.

Austan Goolsbee, who led the council under Mr. Obama when Ms. Rouse was a member, said he expected Ms. Rouse to focus on challenges facing workers in the so-called gig economy — like drivers for ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft — and on workers who suffer long spells of unemployment in the crisis.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Mr. Goolsbee said, “she was way ahead of everyone on the issues of the long-term unemployed. From the second the thing began, she was saying, we’re going to have to think about the long-term unemployed and how to get them out of unemployment.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/business/cecilia-rouse-biden-economist.html