Business Today Seminar: Harvard Professor Gregory Mankiw

The Business Today Seminar on Thursday, April 4, 2024, featured the life and career of economics of Harvard Professor Gregory Mankiw in a moderated discussion by Princeton University Professor Alan Blinder. Leading an extraordinarily distinguished career as an economist, Mankiw served as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) from 2003 to 2005 under President George W. Bush and was the economic advisor to Mitt Romey in 2006, later working with him during his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. An author of several textbooks, he has taught at Harvard University as a professor for 40 years.

Born and raised in New Jersey, Mankiw attended Princeton University with the original intention of being a math major but found the subject at Princeton to differ from what he’d expected and decided he didn’t want to pursue it as a professional career. Later, switching to economics as an interesting alternative in the spring of his freshman year, he studied under former Professor Harvey Rosen, now retired for microeconomics and Professor Burton Malkiel for macroeconomics, forming the pivotal introduction to a field that would become his life’s work. Taking later courses with Professor Alan Blinder as an undergraduate, Mankiw wrote his senior thesis with Blinder’s guidance as his thesis advisor, earning him the introduction by Dr. Blinder during the seminar as his “prized student.” 

Dr. Blinder’s own distinct career as a professor of economics at Princeton began with his bachelor’s in economics from Princeton in 1967 and later his Ph.D. from MIT in 1971. Later, serving in government as the Deputy Assistant Director of the Congressional Budget Office in 1975, President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1994, and as the 15th Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve from 1994 to 1996, Blinder went on to author and co-author over twenty books. His economics textbooks, which have sold millions of copies, have aided the instruction of over 3 million college students to understand the fundamentals of economics. 

Studying alongside later influential economist and University of Berkeley professor David Romer, who would become the valedictorian of their class, Mankiw completed his degree in economics from Princeton in 1980 and went on to earn a Ph.D. at MIT in the field. Considering his career, Dr. Mankiw stated, “Economics for me is very stimulating and a combination of the abstract and practical at the same time.” Dropping out of Harvard Law School in his second year, Mankiw received a job offer to join the economics department at Harvard as an assistant professor. His later service as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) for President George W. Bush was a pivotal moment in his career. Reflecting on the position, he said, “You don’t know what [economic] issues are going to come up.” Navigating a broad range of issues on any given day as the chairman of the CEA, he states he felt like “people were really teaching me a lot in those two years.”