Austan Goolsbee

I don't think I can say enough great things about Austan Goolsbee. But other than my affection for the fact that he teaches the single most relevant and entertaining class at fake grad school, and wrote a really outstanding paper on price insensitivity of web consumers in Amazon and Barnes & Nobles why should you care about him? For one thing, he's Obama's economic advisor, which puts him in a pretty influential role in developing the next eight years of economic policy, whether Obama wins or not; for another he writes a pretty entertaining column in the New York Times, and finally, he's written the only intelligent review and rejection of Micheal Moore's new movie Sicko that I've seen so far. I'm sure his position (let the market handle it -- with tweaks) isn't even remotely tolerated in a great many circles and that might be fair, but it would be a mistake to consider his view dogmatic, unconcerned, or unprincipled - his answer is the standard response from the University of Chicago Economics department. But don't forget he's the economic advisor to what's probably the most liberal Democratic presidential candidate in play while still working at the University of Chicago -- the guy might not be liberal in the regulatory sense of the word, but he's not in the business of being an apologist to big industry -- he's just concerned that we get what we pay for with our regulations.