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Alice Rivlin: “Are We too Polarized to Make Public Decisions?”

Alice Rivlin, Brookings Institute scholar and former vice chair of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, was the guest lecturer at an event sponsored by the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University on Oct. 27 at 5:30 p.m.

Rivlin discussed “Are We Too Polarized to Make Public Decisions?”. The lecture was being held in the SPEA Atrium, 1315 E. Tenth Street (NOTE: change of location).

Rivlin is presently a Brookings Institute scholar in Washington, DC. She serves as a senior fellow there and director of the Greater Washington Research Program, Metropolitan Policy. Her current projects include how to balance the federal budget and how to improve public policy in the Washington metro area. She also is a visiting professor at the Public Policy Institute at Georgetown University.

Rivlin’s expertise is in fiscal and monetary policy, social policy, and urban issues. She previously served as the vice chair of the Board of Governors for the Federal Reserve System under Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. She also was the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget under President Bill Clinton. She was the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office and served in that position from 1975 to 1983.

Rivlin grew up in Bloomington and her connections to IU are deep. Her father was a professor of physics at the university and developed its first cyclotron on campus. As a college student, Rivlin took a summer class at IU in economics, which persuaded her to change her major at Bryn Mawr from history to economics.

Audio of Rivlin’s talk is available at http://video.indiana.edu:8080/ramgen/ip/iucast/bem/lectures/aliceqa.rm.