The Treasury Department announced the hiring of senior leadership for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Among the hires: Harvard University economist Sendhil Mullainathan.
Mr. Mullainathan, 38, got an early lesson in how regulatory changes can affect people’s lives, and how fragile their livelihoods can be when a new rule in the 1980s disallowed foreign aerospace workers from doing defense-related projects. In practice, this meant that foreign workers couldn’t work on aerospace at all, since the delineation between defense and nondefense projects was fuzzy. His Indian father, an engineer at McDonnell Douglas, lost his job.
Mr. Mullainathan, 38, got an early lesson in how regulatory changes can affect people’s lives, and how fragile their livelihoods can be when a new rule in the 1980s disallowed foreign aerospace workers from doing defense-related projects. In practice, this meant that foreign workers couldn’t work on aerospace at all, since the delineation between defense and nondefense projects was fuzzy. His Indian father, an engineer at McDonnell Douglas, lost his job.
“There was this feeling of fragility, wow if my dad doesn’t get a job, then what?” Mr. Mullainathan recalled in a recent interview. “I still have that feeling very strongly, I understand it. It informs my thinking on this stuff and my motivation to work on it.”
- via MR
- via MR
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