Speaker

Jason Furman

Jason Furman

American economist; professor of economic policy at Harvard Kennedy School and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama (2013–2017).

Furman spent the bulk of the Obama years as the White House’s chief economic adviser, overseeing analysis on the 2017 tax law (co-authoring a paper with Robert Barro that modelled its effects), healthcare reform, financial regulation, and trade. After government, he returned to academia while remaining active in policy debates on market concentration, technology platforms, and fiscal space. He chaired a UK government-commissioned review of competition in digital markets that recommended the regulatory architecture now being implemented through the Digital Markets Unit — an asymmetric code of conduct applied only to the largest platforms.

Core positions

Furman is a market-oriented Democrat who takes market power seriously as a policy problem. He holds that rising concentration in sectors such as healthcare and online platforms raises prices and depresses business investment, and that antitrust enforcement in the US has been too permissive — particularly toward acquisitions by dominant tech firms. On productivity, his preferred levers are immigration of skilled workers (which micro evidence links to both direct innovation and spillovers to neighbouring domestic researchers), federal R&D spending, investment tax incentives, and YIMBY housing reform to allow workers to reach high-productivity cities. He is sceptical of discretionary place-based regional policy and of national-security arguments for industrial protection, which he regards as often a cover for protectionism.

On fiscal policy, he applies a framework centred on the relationship between borrowing costs and growth: when real interest rates fall below the economy’s real growth rate, the government can sustain a primary deficit without the debt ratio rising. He regards the current US fiscal trajectory as manageable but imprudent to commit to deliberately — and warns against treating low rates as a free lunch when borrowing finances consumption rather than investment.

In the wiki