Economics adviser to Barack Obama during the campaign, and now a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, Austan Goolsbee is a key figure in framing the economic thinking of the Obama administration.
Perhaps most importantly for Silicon Valley, he's an economist clued in to the tech world. His economics papers cover such topics as the impact of taxes on technology diffusion, the impact of internet subsidies on public schools, and the economic impact of leisure time spent on the internet.
He's worked closely with Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of Nudge fame, and thinks a lot about the power of default options to shape behavior, a topic that any web developer should also know by heart.
Bio
Austan Goolsbee
Austan Goolsbee is a member of the Council of Economic Advisers and the youngest member of the cabinet of President Barack Obama. Goolsbee is also serving as staff director and chief economist on the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
Goolsbee was the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was an economic adviser to Barack Obama's 2004 Senate race before becoming a senior economic adviser to Senator Obama's 2008 Presidential campaign.
He is a member of the panel of Economic Advisers to the Congressional Budget Office, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research fellow at the American Bar Foundation. He is a Senior Economist to the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive Policy Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times. He was recently a Fulbright Scholar and a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.
His work focuses on the new economy, government policy, taxes, and technology.
Goolsbee was selected as one of Financial Times' six "'Gurus of the Future'/Best Under 40" (2005), named one of the Young Global Leaders at the 2005 World Economic Forum, and one of the 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow at the 2002 World Economic Forum.
He was born on August 18, 1969, in Waco, Texas. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in economics from Yale University in 1991, his M.A. in economics from Yale University in 1991, and his Ph.D in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995.
Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O'Reilly Media also publishes online through the O'Reilly Network and hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and the Web 2.0 Conference.
O'Reilly's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. O'Reilly is on the boards of MySQL, CollabNet, Safari Books Online, Wesabe, and ValuesOfN, and is a partner in O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
Social science that analyzes and describes the consequences of choices made concerning scarce productive resources. Economics is the study of how individuals and societies choose to employ those resources: what goods and services will be produced, how they will be produced, and how they will be distributed among the members of society. Economics is customarily divided into microeconomics and macroeconomics. Of major concern to macroeconomists are the rate of economic growth, the inflation rate, and the rate of unemployment. Specialized areas of economic investigation attempt to answer questions on a variety of economic activity; they include agricultural economics, economic development, economic history, environmental economics, industrial organization, international trade, labour economics, money supply and banking, public finance, urban economics, and welfare economics. Specialists in mathematical economics and econometrics provide tools used by all economists. The areas of investigation in economics overlap with many other disciplines, notably history, mathematics, political science, and sociology.
I think it's silly that a discussion of the economy has only two comments, and they are about education.
But now that we are on this topic, why do we have such an abyssimal program for educating children in economics?
Let me point something out: I have taken about 16 years of public education classes. I can calculate a rocket's trajectory and the rate of chemical processes, but I have had zero economic education. Why is this bad? Because I use money every day. The math that every person uses every day is not introduced until late in high school and can be skipped, as I did. We all do cost-benefit analysis on what we purchase or weather we purchase all day every day but we receive little or no education on this topic.
My view is that money, business and trade has always been viewed by intellectuals as a dirty science. This is a medieval viewpoint. Traders and merchants were always viewed as anti-noble. Consider the persecution of the Jews, and the phrase, "money is the root of all evil".
It is no wonder that even with our lavish education spending that our current, and many previous, crisis is one of economics.
I'm not sure I'm getting what you're saying? I, for one, am sure I would not have understood integral and differential equations had it not been for my teacher.
Your methodology seems very much applicable for lower-grade classes, but kids too make cost-benefit analysis on what they want to do, often with little regards to the future. So if you were told to study something, with no measurement of whether you actually did some studying, chances are you're not going to study that hard.
For the kids who already have an interest for the subject, it's not a problem, but for everyone else, you end up with adults lacking many basic skills.
But in line of your thoughts, I agree to a large extent that it's not what you teach the kids to know, but instead how to think. Be inquisitive. Ask questions. Don't take answers such as "Because I said so" for valid.
That will help all children out of getting scammed later in life.
The fight over educational standards is a war of attrition being waged on the public schools. Why oh why can liberals not see this? Standards will never produce quality education.
Human beings of true talent and inspiration are not inspired by hitting arbitrary markers, often put in place and enforced by their intellectual and creative inferiors. Let our kids' exploratory minds soar. Provide them with tools and guidance and evidence of others success. Then and only then will their interest be piqued and their true potential made manifest.
member. 
