Obama’s presidential campaign names Jason Furman as economic policy director

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign announced Jason Furman, who received his PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 2003, as economic policy director.

Furman, 37, had worked closely with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Most recently, he worked as an economist and budget expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, where he headed the Hamilton Project, an economic policy research group aligned with the Democratic Party that was founded by Rubin, now chairman of Citigroup Inc.’s executive committee. He worked in the Clinton administration and at the World Bank. Furman is also a former adviser to 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

Furman’s appointment allies Obama’s campaign with leading economic moderates in the Democratic Party, most notably Rubin, 69, who helped found the Hamilton Project in 2006 and is on the group’s advisory board.

Furman said in an interview that the Obama campaign’s economic goal is based on “broadly shared, bottom-up growth” similar to the views espoused by groups such as the Hamilton Project and the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington research group funded partly by labor unions.

As Obama’s economic policy director, Furman said his priority would be to expand the range of advice and proposals flowing to the presumptive Democratic nominee by reaching out to a wider group of economists.

Furman also named Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute and James Galbraith, a University of Texas economist and son of economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was an advisor to President John F. Kennedy.

Furman attended Harvard University in Cambridge MA receiving a BA in Social Studies, magna cum laude in 1992 and an MA in Government in 1995. He also attended the London School of Economics earning an MSc in Economics in 1993. He received his doctorate in economics from Harvard in Economics in 2003.

For more information about Jason Furman’s appointment as Obama’s economic policy director, please see the Bloomberg article.

For more information on Jason Furman, see his homepage at the Brookings Institute.