Robert Barro, Libertarian
The International Monetary Fund's Prakash Loungani has written an interesting intellectual profile of economist Robert Barro, a perennial short-lister for a Nobel Prize whose work is as influential as it is ignored by governments. A snippet:
Barro's libertarian beliefs perhaps also explain in part why, unlike many other famous macroeconomists, he has not been a prominent policy advisor to the U.S. or other governments. It's difficult to "be popular with governments" when advocating that many of their functions ought to fade away, he says. In any event, he has not been very influential in his rare forays into giving advice to governments, as he candidly admitted in Nothing Is Sacred. In one essay in that book, he describes being whisked away to Moscow from his Cape Cod vacation in the summer of 1998; his advice to the Russian government that it set up a currency board was not taken. Nor was the South Korean government receptive to his advice to adopt the dollar as its currency and to abandon its resistance to foreign ownership of the country's banks.
Loungani reviewed Jagdish Bhagwati's In Defense of Globalization for reason here.
