This conversation features Lawrence Summers, Director of the National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy.
Judy Woodruff, Senior Correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, moderates.
Bio
Lawrence Summers
Lawrence H. Summers is the Director of the National Economic Council. He was appointed by President Barack H. Obama on November 24, 2008.
Until January, he was the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University. He served as the 27th president of Harvard University from July 2001 until June 2006. From 1999 to 2001, he served as the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury following his earlier service as Deputy and Under Secretary of the Treasury and as Chief Economist of the World Bank.
Summers has taught economics at Harvard and MIT. His research contributions were recognized when he received the John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to the outstanding American economist under the age of 40, and when he was the first social scientist to receive the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award for outstanding scientific achievement. He is a member of the National Academy of Science and has written extensively on economic analysis and policy publishing over 150 articles in professional economic journals.
Lawrence Summers received his B.S. from MIT and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard.
Judy Woodruff
Judy Woodruff is a PBS correspondent for Newshour with Jim Lehrer. She has reported on politics and breaking news for over three decades at three major networks, NBC, PBS and CNN. Woodruff left CNN in June 2005 to pursue longer-form journalism opportunities in addition to teaching, writing and public speaking.
During her 12 years at CNN, Woodruff anchored "Inside Politics," a show for political insiders across the country.
Prior to her joining CNN in 1993, Woodruff was the chief Washington correspondent for NBC's "Today Show," the White House correspondent for NBC News, and the chief Washington correspondent for the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour.
Process by which a nation's wealth increases over time. The most widely used measure of economic growth is the real rate of growth in a country's total output of goods and services (gauged by the gross domestic product adjusted for inflation, or “real GDP”). Other measures (e.g., national income per capita, consumption per capita) are also used. The rate of economic growth is influenced by natural resources, human resources, capital resources, and technological development in the economy along with institutional structure and stability. Other factors include the level of world economic activity and the terms of trade. See alsoeconomic development.
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