SAN DIEGO — Among Jews nominated for important posts in the Biden Administration is Secretary of the Treasury-designate Janet Yellen, a former chair of the Federal Reserve. Although she and her husband, Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof, have not to date talked much publicly about their religious beliefs, it is known that as residents of Berkeley, California, decades ago, they attended services at that city’s Congregation Beth El, and that their son Robert Akerlof, who is now himself a professor of economics at the University of Warwick, was enrolled by them in the Beth El preschool.
On its website, Beth El describes itself as “a vibrant and growing Reform Jewish congregation…. Our synagogue was organized in 1945 as a liberal synagogue guided by a reverence for tradition, and these values continue to shape our congregation. At Beth El, we actively welcome individuals and families of all backgrounds who are seeking community and wish to explore Jewish practice, spiritual growth and learning.”
If confirmed by the Senate, Yellen will be the third consecutive Secretary of the Treasury who is Jewish, succeeding Steven Mnuchin in President Donald J. Trump’s current administration and Jack Lew of former President Barack Obama’s administration. Other past Jewish Treasury Secretaries include Henry Morgenthau Jr., appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, both appointed by Bill Clinton.
In a recent edition of Harvard University’s magazine, writer Marina N. Bolotnikova traced Yellen’s life, including the humanitarian influence that her physician father, Dr. Julius Yellen, had on her. Bolotnikova quoted Radcliffe Institute Dean Lizabeth Cohen, in a recent introduction of Yellen to a Harvard University luncheon, as saying that her father treated Brooklyn many dock workers. “These working families made a deep impression on the young Janet, because dock work by its nature was vulnerable to economic fluctuation, which mean frequent periods of unemployment,” Cohen commented. “From her earliest memories, she understood that its effects were, in her words, ‘simply terrible on the mental and physical health of workers, on their marriages, and on their children.’ The human effects of the labor market–and the urge to do something about them–would go on to shape Yellen’s remarkable career.”
Cohen didn’t use these words, but the Jewish concept of tikkun olam — repair of the world — appeared to be one of Yellen’s motivations to enter the world of economics. Another motivation, according to Yellen at that luncheon in which she answered questions posed by Economics Prof. N. Gregory Mankiw, “I’d always been interested in math … and I saw economics as a field that uses math and quantitative techniques, but for an important social purpose: advancing human welfare, and understanding problems that keep people from fulfilling their lives.”
The Encyclopedia Brittanica reports that Yellen graduated summa cum laude in economics from Brown University in 1967, received her doctorate from Yale in 1971, and worked at Harvard as an assistant professor of economics until 1976. She served as an economist for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, lectured at the London School of Economics, and joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1980, where she taught until taking a leave of absence in 1994 to serve a three-year term on the Board of Governor of the Federal Reserve.
Afterwards she chaired President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors as well as the Economic Policy Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). She taught again at UC Berkeley from 1999 to 2004, and then became the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She became the vice chair of the Fed in 2010, and was nominated by Barack Obama in 2013 to chair the Federal Reserve, winning Senate confirmation by a vote of 56 to 26 in 2014. She was the third consecutive Federal Reserve Board chair who was Jewish, preceded by Alan Greenspan (1987-2006) and Ben Bernacke (2006-2014). When her four-year term ended in 2018, President Donald Trump appointed Jerome Powell to succeed her.
Yellen’s husband’s Nobel Prize stemmed from his deliberations on the impact asymmetrical information has on the marketplace, choosing for a title of his 1970 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism” with “lemons” in this case referring to malfunctioning automobiles that might be sold to a consumer by an unscrupulous salesperson. Lawrence B. Krause of Encinitas, a retired economics professor at UC San Diego who served as senior staff on President Lyndon Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisors, told San Diego Jewish World that Akerlof’s thesis also can be applied to the health care field.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. he may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com