Personality Spotlight: Austan Goolsbee

Austan Goolsbee, part of a new breed at the University of Chicago's famed economics school, hopes to bring a fresh way of looking at the economy to Washington.

Goolsbee, 39, Wednesday was named a staff director of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's new Economic Recovery Advisory Board as well a member of his Council of Economic Advisers.

Unlike another University of Chicago economist, Milton Friedman, whose Libertarian-style embrace of small government and opposition to regulation greatly influenced the Republican Party, Goolsbee is part the school's new generation of economists which focuses on human activity in natural settings and attempt find economic explanations for why people behave the way they do.

He counts among his colleagues Steven Levitt, author of the best-seller Freakonomics. An early scholar on the relationship between the Internet and economics, Goolsbee has been Obama's chief economic adviser since 2004 and was instrumental in developing the use of the Internet for his campaign.

Goolsbee has been a research fellow at the American Bar Foundation, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., and a member of the Panel of Economic Advisers to the Congressional Budget Office.

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