Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval

by Jon Hilsenrath

Many of the nation’s founders, during their own age of upheaval, understood that their most profound task was to create institutions that could be trusted to fairly and effectively manage the unruly behavior that drove markets and also moved government to extremes and misjudgments. If those institutions—the Constitution, the rule of law, trusted courts, a fair and reliable system of national commerce, a free and unaligned media, reliable elections, effective bureaucracy—failed, then the causes of free markets and free people would fail too.2 “Vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty,” observed Alexander Hamilton in his first Federalist Paper. Failure in the endeavor of building these institutions, he said, was the road to despotism. His mentor George Washington warned in his farewell address of the “designing men” who sowed the seeds of public division that threatened to pull the young nation apart.