Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval

Wall Street Journal reporter Hilsenrath debuts with a mostly strong biography of Janet Yellen, the first woman to lead the Federal Reserve. Hilsenrath covers Yellen’s youth in Brooklyn in a family that “wasn’t rich but lived well,” and her time at Yale, where she studied under influential economist (and later Nobel laureate) James Tobin. He also highlights Yellen’s her advocacy for low interest rates and her “mantra” that there were human lives behind the high unemployment numbers during the Great Recession—“These are fucking people,” she yelled in one meeting. Hilsenrath devotes almost equivalent space to the life and work of Yellen’s husband, economist George Akerlof. Their marriage, unconventional for the time (he frequently assumed household duties), was one of the rare impulsive decisions the deliberative Yellen ever made, and the author writes that it was their shared philosophy that they were the “lighthouse keepers” for something larger that informed Yellen’s views on economic policy. The authors wanders off on a fair share of digressions on the political and economic contours of Yellen’s years in Washington, and though Hilsenrath never quite gets at what makes his subject tick as a person, his meticulous account of her career leave no stone unturned. The result is an oft-powerful study of a key player in American economics. (Nov.)