Speaker Biographies
Michael Boskin
Michael J. Boskin is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the T. M. Friedman Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In addition, he serves on several federal advisory panels and as an adviser to presidents and prime ministers, finance ministries, and central banks around the world, from the United States to China.
Boskin served as chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) from 1989 to 1993. The independent Council for Excellence in Government rated his CEA one of the five most respected agencies (out of one hundred) in the federal government. He chaired the highly influential blue-ribbon Commission on Consumer Price Index, whose report has transformed the way government statistical agencies around the world measure inflation, GDP, and productivity.
Boskin serves on several corporate boards of directors, including Exxon Mobil Corporation, Oracle Corporation, and Vodafone PLC, and several philanthropic boards and is a consultant to numerous other businesses and government agencies.
In addition to Stanford and the University of California, Boskin has taught at Harvard and Yale. He is the author of more than one hundred books and articles. He is internationally recognized for his research on world economic growth, tax and budget theory and policy, U.S. saving and consumption patterns, and the implications of changing technology and demography on capital, labor, and product markets.
Boskin has received numerous professional awards and citations, including Stanford's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1988, the National Association of Business Economists' Abramson Award for outstanding research and its Distinguished Fellow Award, the Medal of the President of the Italian Republic in 1991 for his contributions to global economic understanding, and the 1998 Adam Smith Prize for outstanding contributions to economics.
Boskin received his B.A. with highest honors and the Chancellor's Award as outstanding undergraduate in 1967 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he also received his M.A. in 1968 and his Ph.D. in 1971.
Austan Goolsbee
Austan Goolsbee is the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business and co-director of the University's Initiative on Global Markets. He is also a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the American Bar Foundation and a senior economist at the Progressive Policy Institute. He is a member of the panel of Economic Advisers to the Congressional Budget Office (though currently on leave for the campaign) and former member of the U.S. Census Advisory Commission. A former Fulbright Scholar and Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, Goolsbee's academic research has covered numerous areas including tax policy, technology and innovation, manufacturing and employment. He also writes an economics column for the New York Times and, in 2005, won a Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism. Previously he served as a special consultant to the Department of Justice for antitrust policy, a member of the Macroeconomic Taskforce for Polish Economic Restructuring, and as a staff member for former Senator David Boren.
Leo Hindery, Jr.
Leo Hindery, Jr. is Managing Partner of InterMedia Partners VII, LP, a New York-based media industry private equity fund which he founded in 2005 and which is a successor to six previous InterMedia investment funds that he formed beginning in 1988. The investments of those earlier funds were sold in 1998-1999.
Until October 2004, Mr. Hindery was Chairman (and until May 2004 Chief Executive Officer) of The YES Network, the nation’s largest regional sports network which he founded in the summer of 2001 as the television home of the New York Yankees, where he won five executive producer Emmys for outstanding programming. From December 1999 until January 2001, Mr. Hindery was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of GlobalCenter Inc., a major Internet services company, which was then merged into Exodus Communications, Inc. Until November 1999, Mr. Hindery was President and Chief Executive Officer of AT&T Broadband, which was formed out of the March 1999 merger of Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) into AT&T. (AT&T Broadband encompassed all of AT&T’s video, local telephone and Internet services operations.) Mr. Hindery was elected President of TCI and all of its affiliated companies, then the world’s largest cable television system operator and programming entity, in February 1997.
Mr. Hindery is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Senate-appointed Vice Chair of the HELP Commission formed in 2003 by an Act of Congress to improve U.S. foreign assistance. He is Vice Chair of the Paley Center for Media; a Trustee of New School University; a Director of the Library of Congress Trust Fund, the Minority Media & Telecommunications Council, and Teach for America; and on the Corporate Advisory Board of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Mr. Hindery is an executive-in-residence at Columbia Business School, and a member of the Board of Visitors of the Columbia School of Journalism.
Mr. Hindery has in the past been recognized as International Cable Executive of the Year, Cable Television Operator of the Year, one of Business Week’s “Top 25 Executives of the Year”, and one of the cable industry’s “25 Most Influential Executives Over the Past 25 Years”. He co-founded, along with Russian Federation Council Chairman Sergey Mironov, Transatlantic Partners Against AIDS (TPAA), and received from the Asia Society its Founders Award for his efforts in the international fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Recently, he received the “Keeper of the Dream” Award from the National Action Network for his efforts on behalf of equality and worker rights.
Mr. Hindery is the author of “The Biggest Game of All” (Free Press, 2003) and “It Takes a CEO: It’s Time to Lead With Integrity” (Free Press, 2005). He is married to Patti Wheeler, and has a daughter from a previous marriage, Robin Hindery, who is a journalist. For recreation, Mr. Hindery is active in motor sports, and his personal racing resume, which began in NASCAR from 1995-1997, includes the 24 Hours of Le Mans (2002-2005) where as a driver he finished first in class in 2005 and second in 2003.
Mr. Hindery has a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and is an under graduate of Seattle University. Mr. Hindery has received honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degrees from Emerson College and the Rabbinical College of America.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin
Douglas Holtz-Eakin is currently Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Policy Director of John McCain 2008. Dr. Holtz-Eakin most recently served as the Director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and the Paul A. Volcker Chair in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to that, Dr. Holtz-Eakin served as the sixth Director of the Congressional Budget Office, where he was appointed for a four-year term beginning February 4, 2003. Dr. Holtz-Eakin previously served for eighteen months as Chief Economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Prior to that, Dr. Holtz-Eakin served as a Trustee Professor of Economics at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University. At the Maxwell School, he served as Chairman of the Department of Economics and Associate Director of the Center for Policy Research.
Gene Sperling
Gene Sperling is Senior Economic Advisor to Senator Clinton's presidential campaign. Previously, Mr. Sperling served as National Economic Advisor to President Clinton from 1997 to 2001 and as Deputy National Economic Advisor from 1993 to 1997.
Mr. Sperling is the author of the book The Pro-Growth Progressive: An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity (Simon & Schuster) and his recent article, "Rising Tide Economics," appears in the September issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Mr. Sperling is also a Contributing Editor and Columnist for Bloomberg News, a Governor of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, and for four years was a consultant and contributing writer for the television show, The West Wing .
David Wessel
David Wessel, 53, is economics editor of The Wall Street Journal and writes the "Capital” column, a weekly look at the economy and forces shaping living standards around the world. He also appears frequently on CNBC and National Public Radio. David joined The Wall Street Journal in 1984 in Boston, and moved to Washington in 1987, where he was deputy bureau chief until assuming his current job in September 2007. In 1999 and 2000, he served as the newspaper’s Berlin bureau chief. He previously worked for the Boston Globe, the Hartford (Conn.) Courant and Middletown (Conn.) Press. A 1975 graduate of Haverford College, he was Knight Bagehot Fellow in Business & Economics Journalism at Columbia University in 1980-81. David has shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one for Boston Globe stories in 1983 on the persistence of racism in Boston and the other for stories in The Wall Street Journal in 2002 on corporate wrong-doing. He is the co-author, with Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Davis, of Prosperity, a 1998 book that argues that the next 20 years will be better for the American middle class than the previous 20.
He and his wife, Naomi Karp, senior policy advisor at AARP’s Public Policy Institute, have two children, Julia, a senior at Kenyon College, and Ben, a freshman at Middlebury College. David is a trustee of Temple Sinai in Washington, D.C., and has served as a member of the Committee for Economic Development’s Research Advisory Board and the advisory board of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University.
Judy Woodruff
Broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff has covered politics and other news for more than three decades at CNN, NBC and PBS. Most recently, she signed on as a senior correspondent and political editor for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
In early 2007, Woodruff concluded initial reporting and production, along with MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, on Generation Next: Speak Up. Be Heard. Generation Next is a project that interviewed American young people and reported on their views, and included an hour-long documentary aired on many PBS stations in January, 2007, a series of reports on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, reports on NPR and in USA Today, and partnerships with Yahoo! and Film Your Issue. A second hour-long Generation Next documentary aired on PBS stations on September 5, 2007.
For 12 years, Woodruff served as anchor and senior correspondent for CNN, anchoring the weekday political program, Inside Politics. At PBS from 1983 to 1993, she was the chief Washington correspondent for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and from 1984-1990, she anchored PBS' award-winning weekly documentary series, Frontline with Judy Woodruff.
At NBC News, Woodruff served as White House correspondent from 1977 to 1982. For one year after that she served as NBC's Today Show Chief Washington correspondent.
