Michael Jay Boskin (born September 23, 1945) is the T. M. Friedman Professor of Economics and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He also is chief executive officer and president of Boskin & Co., an economic consulting company, and serves on the Commerce Department's Advisory Committee on the National Income and Product Accounts.

Early life and education

Boskin holds B.A. with highest honors, M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, earned in 1967, 1968, and 1971 respectively. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Career

He joined Stanford University in 1970. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Notoriously, during his time as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the G.H.W. Bush administration, he is noted to have said in 1990, "Potato chips, semiconductor chips, what is the difference? They are all chips. A hundred dollars' worth of one or a hundred dollars' worth of the other is still a hundred dollars." Boskin has been a director of Exxon Mobil since 1996. He has been a regular contributor to Project Syndicate since 2009. He also served as the chair of the Boskin Commission, which changed the way inflation was measured. He is a director of Oracle Corporation, Shinsei Bank, and Vodafone Group. He currently serves on the Commerce Department's Advisory Committee on the National Income and Product Accounts.

Publications

Books edited

Journal articles

Reception

Boskin is the recipient of the Adam Smith Prize. According to Patrick Buchanan, in Death of Manufacturing, Boskin was sanguine about the transfer of United States manufacturing overseas.