He sat in Obama's cabinet as chief economist. These days he grades freshmen on supply and demand, then goes on cable news to tell you why the sky is, eventually, going to fall.
A wonk who posts charts on X the way other people post brunch - and whose footnotes have moved markets.
On any given week, Jason Furman is doing three jobs that rarely share a room. He is standing in front of a Harvard lecture hall walking first-years through Economics 10. He is filing an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal or Project Syndicate that other economists will spend the next 48 hours arguing about. And he is on Squawk Box, deadpan, explaining what a Supreme Court tariff ruling actually means for the price of the thing in your cart.
He is the Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy, a joint appointment between the Harvard Kennedy School and the economics department, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Titles, plural, because one was never going to hold him.
What makes Furman unusual is not the resume, impressive as it is. It is the willingness to follow a number off a cliff, even when the cliff is on the wrong side of his own political tribe. In 2025 he wrote a New York Times piece with the almost mischievous headline "The Tariffs Kicked In. The Sky Didn't Fall. Were the Economists Wrong?" His answer, roughly: the sky is falling, just slowly, and on a lag - the economy had cooled and inflation had ticked up exactly as the textbook predicted, while the loudest tariffs got quietly called off before they could land.
That instinct - trust the data, distrust the slogan - is the through-line of a career that began as a graduate-student staffer fetching numbers for Joseph Stiglitz and ended, so far, with a cabinet seat and a lecture hall.
He is also, by temperament, an institution-builder. He sits on the Council on Foreign Relations, the Group of Thirty, and the Aspen Economic Strategy Group; he is a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation and an advisor to the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. These are the rooms where economic consensus gets argued into shape, and Furman is a fixture in most of them.
"There's no one I'd rather turn to for straightforward, unvarnished advice that helps me to do my job." - President Barack Obama, naming Furman to chair the CEA, June 2013
In 1996 he was a Harvard grad student handed a one-year gig crunching numbers for the Council of Economic Advisers under Joseph Stiglitz. He followed Stiglitz to the World Bank, then into the Clinton-era National Economic Council. He earned the PhD in 2004 under Greg Mankiw - the same Mankiw who had chaired the CEA for a Republican president - which tells you something about how Furman moves through Washington: by argument, not by team color.
He ran economic policy for John Kerry in 2004, built the Hamilton Project at Brookings into the wonkiest workshop in town, then signed on as Obama's economic policy director in 2008. As deputy director of the NEC he helped design the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - the largest fiscal stimulus in a generation, drafted while the financial system was on fire. In 2013 Obama made it official and named him the 28th Chair of the CEA.
Since 2017 he has been at Harvard, and since 2019 he has co-taught Ec10 with David Laibson - meaning the person who once advised a sitting president on the global economy now also explains the demand curve to eighteen-year-olds. He seems to like the second job at least as much as the first.
The arc reads cleanly now, but it was built in the unglamorous middle of things: a staff seat here, a deputy directorship there, a year at the World Bank, visiting appointments at NYU, Columbia and Yale slotted between Washington tours. He spent the 2000s at Brookings turning the Hamilton Project - an outfit founded by former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to develop pragmatic, growth-minded policy - into a place where ideas got pressure-tested before they reached a campaign platform. By the time the 2008 financial crisis arrived, he was one of the few people who had both the academic grounding and the operational scar tissue to help write the response.
"Wal-Mart's low prices help to increase real wages for the 120 million Americans employed in other sectors of the economy." - "Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story," 2005 - the paper that made organized labor wince
Co-teaches Harvard's legendary year-long intro course, Ec10, with David Laibson - one of the largest and most influential undergrad classes in America. The man who briefed a president now diagrams the demand curve for first-years.
A regular byline in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Project Syndicate, plus a relentless X feed where he live-annotates the economy. His charts get screenshotted into other people's arguments, and his threads have a way of setting the morning's terms of debate before the markets even open.
The 2005 Wal-Mart paper is the cleanest window into how Furman thinks. Writing as a Democratic economist while the left was treating the retailer as a villain, he argued the opposite: that low prices function as a raise for the tens of millions of Americans who do not work there but shop there, and that the productivity revolution the company kicked off rippled across the whole economy. It was, he wrote with deliberate provocation, "a progressive success story." Organized labor never quite forgave it, and the paper resurfaced as a live controversy when Obama nominated him to chair the CEA in 2013.
That pattern - reaching the conclusion the numbers support rather than the one his team wants to hear - has made him a useful irritant in every direction. He has been called a deficit hawk and a stimulus champion, sometimes in the same week, because he treats fiscal policy as a question of timing and arithmetic rather than ideology. Run the deficit when the economy needs the demand; rein it in when it does not.
The same coolness shows up in his tariff commentary. He does not predict catastrophe for applause; he predicts a slow grind - a percentage point or so added to inflation, growth shaved a little, the damage arriving on a lag and partly disguised when the most extreme measures get withdrawn. It is a less satisfying story than a crash, and almost certainly a more accurate one.
There is a quieter throughline here too: teaching. Co-teaching Ec10, Harvard's year-long gateway into the discipline, is not a ceremonial post for a former cabinet member. It is the front door through which a large share of the university's undergraduates first meet economics at all, and how those students learn to reason about prices, incentives and tradeoffs shapes a generation of future bankers, founders, civil servants and voters. For someone who has spent a career arguing that good policy starts with clear thinking, there may be no higher-leverage classroom in the country.