Janet Yellen stands out in Washington for transparency, not letting success go to her head and devotion to policies that would make the economy work better for everyone, veteran journalist Owen Ullman told a Natinonal Press Club Headliners Book Rap Nov. 16.
Ullmann spoke about his new book, Empathy Economics: Janet Yellen’s Remarkable Rise to Power and Her Drive to Forge Prosperity for All, by answering questions posed by former NPC President Mark Hamrick, Bankrate.com Washington bureau chief.
Yellen is the first person to occupy the top three economic positions in Washington: chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers and Treasury Secretary, Hamrick said. She is also the first woman to hold the Federal Reserve and Treasury positions, he added.
Although others have written biographies of Yellen, Ullmann’s is the first comprehensive biography, the author said. He said he met her about 1994, when she was a junior Fed governor and he was writing for Business Week.
“We just kind of hit it off. She was very bright, very engaging and…very transparent.” Ullmann said. “She gave a really smart explanation of what policy really was.”
In the book Ullmann illustrates this explanatory ability by describing times Yellen was able to analyze an economic problem with a straightforward economic model and clearly explain it. He wrote that she developed a good relationship with former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan by writing a labor market model that embedded his insights when she was a board member.
Ullmann also relates many incidents when Yellen advocated policies that considered the consequences of policies for lower income and potentially unemployed people.
During the event, Ullmann traced Yellen's concern for lower income people to having watched her father, a doctor in New York, treat for free those who couldn’t pay.
“She would see on their faces not only the pain of not being able to make ends meet, but the lack of self-esteem from not having a job and not being able to support their families,” Ullmann said.
Ullmann traces the traits of perfectionism and preparation to Yellen’s mother, who insisted on straight A’s and always doing your best.
In the book, he describes Yellen's meticulous preparation in all the positions she held, which include teaching at Harvard University and the business school of the University of California at Berkley.
Yellen found politics challenging because holding senior political positions limited her ability to speak publicly as she wished, Ullmann said. Likewise, he surmised that she doesn’t like writing because of the challenge to do it perfectly.
Ullmann ended by noting that when she was preparing to give the commencement speech at her alma mater, Fort Hamilton High School, he said it was symbolic that Hamilton was the first Treasury Secretary and that, 231 years later, she was the first female Treasury Secretary.
Yellen cooperated with the book, giving him over a dozen conversations of an hour or more. He was also able to interview her husband, George Akerlof, an economics Nobel Prize winner, and her son, Robert, known as “Robby,” also an economist, Ullmann said. She had only one requirement: she wanted to review all her quotes in the book. He agreed and described receiving a detailed, edited copy of them, a week after he gave them to her.
Ullmann had first urged Yellen to write her own memoir, but she demurred, saying her life was not that dramatic and people wouldn’t be interested, he said. He responded, “I’m interested.”
