Economic events, ideas, and policies: the 1960s and after

I want to thank Bill Brainard and George Perry for inviting me to this conference on the 1960s and after, in the memory of Arthur Okun. It is a pleasure to participate. I had the opportunity to meet Arthur Okun in the mid 1970s when I was in Washington working on the staff of the Council of Economics Advisers (CEA). I have always admired his ability to translate complex macroeconomic ideas into simple, quantitative, and highly useful constructs, such as potential GNP and Okun’s law. As a macroeconomist, the 1960s have always been an interesting period for me. I first got interested in macroeconomics when I was a college student in the 1960s. One reason that I was attracted to macroeconomics was a fascination with how new quantitative methods were being used to help formulate policy in Washington. My undergraduate thesis project was on monetary and fiscal policy rules, which I viewed as part of the same quantitative approach that Arthur Okun and others were using at the CEA. I was interested in dynamic stability issues, following the methodology of A.W. Phillips, Will Baumol, and Phil Howrey (the latter two were at Princeton where I was in college at that time). I think the approach taken to quantitative formulation of policy at