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A tribute to Marty Feldstein. shar.es/aXwczv
It is hard for me to think about carrying on my career as an economist without Marty Feldstein. I first met Marty in 1973, when he hired me as part of his flotilla of a dozen or so research assistants.
My project involved extending Marty’s work on social security and saving by looking at international comparisons.
I learned from Marty that summer that economics was not a field but a calling. A doctor could treat and help a patient. An economist could raise the standard of living of millions who would never know his or her name.
Better managed economies can, history teaches, be the difference between war and peace.
Ideas that economists today take for granted, above all that public policies have major incentive effects and that people and businesses respond strongly to incentives had fallen out of the professional economic discourse by the late 1960s.
Then Marty started publishing a paper a month in a major journal demonstrating a previously undocumented incentive effect of a tax, spending or social insurance program.
Forty years later, the individual papers have often been superseded but the lessons that incentives matter, that taxes and spending and social insuring shape them, and that economists can measure them and make the world work better surely endure.
Washington is often not a nice place. In the face of plenty of counter evidence, Marty maintained his faith in the power of ideas and good faith analytical advocacy.
In Washington, and for that matter every place else, I never saw him say a truly nasty thing or make an ad hominem argument. His first loyalty was never to a party or a President but to the truth as he saw it.
Marty, as well as anyone I knew, wove together the roles of public intellectual and academic economist. Unlike many engaged with policy, he tested his ideas with academic stars but he also never forgot the importance of both learning from and reaching a broad audience.
Teacher, scholar, public official, public intellectual, academic entrepreneur, mentor, close friend. It’s hard to imagine anything economists do where Marty did not excel.
It’s hard to imagine our profession or my career without him. Thank you my mentor and my friend and may you Rest In Peace.
