The Reimagining the Economy team is excited to welcome Dr. Heather Boushey as a Senior Fellow. Boushey brings an impressive array of experience in economics and policy to the project. Most recently, she was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist for the Invest in America Cabinet in the 
Biden White House. As such, she was a key figure in the administration’s major industrial policy agenda, including the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS & Science Act. Her commitment to an economic agenda for all Americans is a long-standing one. Early in her career, she worked as an economist for the Center for American Progress, Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, Center for Economic and Policy Research, and Economic Policy Institute. In 2013, she co-founded the , a “non-profit research and grantmaking organization dedicated to advancing evidence-backed ideas and policies that promote strong, stable, and broad-based economic growth.” She was the Center’s President and CEO and a Steering Committee member until 2020. In 2016, she served as chief economist for former Secretary of State Clinton’s transition team.
Boushey has written two books, Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict and Unbound: How Economic Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It — one of — and co-edited another, After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality. Her work is widely recognized as innovative and influential. She was featured in a as “at the forefront of a generation of economists rethinking their discipline” and one of the “most vibrant voices in the field.” Politico included her on their list of top 50 “thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics” in and .
When she joins Reimagining the Economy, she will be reflecting on her work in the Biden administration. In her words, “Our goal was to deliver strong, shared, sustainable economic growth… Core to this strategy was the implementation of a modern American industrial strategy. This took the form of new, robust investments in foundational infrastructure, using the power of government funds and policy steps to crowd-in capacity-expanding, productivity-increasing investment into critical sectors, always with an eye to how to ensure this agenda empowered workers and benefited communities across the country, particularly those who had for too long been left behind.”
She will be writing about what they accomplished, as she thinks about the future of the American economy: “what went well and what needs to be improved, and where we go from here.”
The Reimagining the Economy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School was founded in 2022. Over the past few years, our team has been deeply engaged in work on place-based policies and addressing economic distress in the U.S., as well as industrial and productive development policies around the world. We are looking forward to working with Boushey and learning from her wealth of experience, as we engage local practitioners, students, and the broader research community.
