Heather Boushey, a member of US president Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors and one of the architects of the administration’s approach to everything from corporate concentration to inequality, climate change and the caring economy, is in some ways the embodiment of the president’s “work, not wealth” slogan. “My dad was a machinist at Boeing,” she says. “I was very lucky. He was in a union. He had great healthcare . . . That foundation allowed me to get to college and to graduate school.”
The fact that this paradigm hardly exists now is one of the things that motivates the 51-year-old economist, who previously ran the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “If you walk into a basic economics class, the professor is likely to say that the economy is a three-legged stool: it’s land, it’s labour, and it’s capital . . . [but] we didn’t think as much about the human side.” Her mandate is to find a way to fix the big four crises in America right now — healthcare, economic growth, the climate and racial justice — by rebalancing the stool so that capital no longer has such disproportionate advantage over labour.
Boushey’s 2019 book Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It explained why equality and prosperity not only can but must go hand in hand. She is now part of a cadre of young appointees and Washington insiders who are embracing the political part of the political economy. They are moving beyond neoliberal, laissez-faire, consumer-oriented thinking to look critically at the power structures that underpin (and all too often undermine) the country and its citizenry.