Jason Furman, a well-regarded left-of-center economist and veteran of the Clinton and Obama administration, has been named chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. No one doubts Furman’s qualifications, and I’ve admired his work for a long time — particularly his somewhat contrarian 2007 call for progressive cost-consciousness in health reform. Furman is the best kind of centrist neoliberal, and his appointment is an encouraging sign. Yet I was struck by the following from Peter Coy’s short piece on Furman in Bloomberg Businessweek:

In contrast to Krueger, a lifelong scholar who used the CEA as a bully pulpit for presenting economic concepts, Furman has been involved in policy for years. In 1996, while still in graduate school, he landed a one-year post as special assistant to President Bill Clinton for economic policy. He also worked as a senior economic adviser to World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz and for Clinton’s National Economic Council. He advised Al Gore on his 2000 presidential campaign, Wesley Clark and then John Kerry in 2004, and Obama in 2008.

How is it that a young graduate student in his mid-20s land a job as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton? Bright young people, including some acquaintances of mine, often find themselves in such roles, particularly when they are as bright as Furman. But another aspect of his biography, as described by Ruth Shalit Barrett in New York in 2009, might have also helped:

A native New Yorker with a swanky family pedigree—his mother runs a charitable foundation, and his father, a real-estate developer, has donated more than $20 million to NYU—Furman is expected to be named deputy director of the National Economic Council.

This occurred to me because the Furman Center at New York University, named in honor of Jason Furman’s father Jay Furman, does valuable work on housing policy, crime, and other urban issues. Some will no doubt see Furman’s rapid rise as a sign of the incestuousness of America’s power elite. It is worth noting, however, that while Furman is the son of affluent parents, his scholarly work and his policy work have been centrally concerned with bettering the lives of the poor. More broadly, while it is true that some other young graduate student might have done as good a job as Furman back in 1996, and perhaps someone from a less distinguished or prosperous background should have been given the same shot, Furman seems to have justified the confidence that was placed in him. 

I think of this as the Sofia Coppola question. Coppola may well be the most talented filmmaker of her generation, and I think she has almost unerring taste. Somewhere is one of my favorite films, and the forthcoming The Bling Ring looks hilarious and excellent. It is also true that Coppola benefited from having grown up in a family of filmmakers, which presumably gave her exposure and experience that allowed her to make impressive leaps early in life. So should we object to her success on grounds of nepotism or should we celebrate the fact that individual achievement is almost always built — in part, and in complex ways – on the achievements of others?

On the right and the left, there is a tendency to either discount the role of inheritance, i.e., the transmission of economic or cultural or social capital, or to reject its legitimacy. We hear this in calls for steeper inheritance taxes, for example. But of course one of the main reasons people build wealth is to better the lives of family members. The durability of inequality across generations flows from this partiality, yet a project of attacking this kind of partiality is deeply illiberal and deeply destructive, I would argue, of the creative energies that sustain a civilization like ours. Rather than focus on inequality as such, which is inevitable as long as partiality to family endures, I think we’d be better served by focusing on expanding the capacities of the most isolated and vulnerable individuals and families. The benefits that will flow from this project might take many decades to bear fruit, but this is the time-scale we ought to keep in mind.