Freakonomics Radio
Fed Up
Mary Daly rose from high-school dropout to president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She thinks the central bank needs an upgrade too. It starts with recognizing that the economy is made up of actual humans.
Just under a year ago, Mary Daly took over the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the largest of the Fed’s 12 branches. Daly, who started working at the San Francisco Fed in 1996, doesn’t have a background typical of people who populate elite academic circles: a high-school dropout from a low-income family who is also openly gay and, in her words, “four-foot-eleven-and-a-half on a very strong day.” She did complete her GED, going on to college and getting her economics PhD from Syracuse University.
The Fed’s reach over the economy means that it affects just about every American, every day, and billions of other people. But it has historically seemed to approach this mission at a serious remove. The Fed has not, for example, seemed very interested in explaining why a country as rich as ours has so many people just one step away from financial ruin — as Daly’s own family was. Or why we’ve built an economy that’s so good at providing cheap food, clothing, and TVs, while the cost of…
