Alice Rivlin: The Doyenne of Budget Policy

In 1972, my professor at the Maxwell Faculty of Syracuse College handed me a small guide and informed me that it will be the most essential text about public coverage evaluation I might read. This was a tall order, but almost 50 years later, his phrases stand true. The guide was Alice Rivlin’s now basic Systematic Considering for Social Action, which encouraged using systematic evaluation to seek out the neatest and best methods to deal with social issues.

Years later, we keep in mind Alice, who died in Might, as an mental big with Midwestern sensibilities. Throughout her life, she held a set of lofty positions: assistant secretary for coverage and evaluation at what was then the Department of Well being, Schooling and Welfare; founding director of the Congressional Price range Workplace; director of the Office of Management and Price range; president of the American Economics Affiliation; and vice chair of the Federal Reserve. She was one of the first recipients of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award—a tribute to her talent constructing the CBO, probably the most necessary public establishments of our lifetime.

In between her authorities service, she sat on a excessive perch at the Brookings Establishment, producing rigorous, centrist, and insightful books and articles on a wide range of federal insurance policies. In her spare time, she was credited with “saving D.C.” from bankruptcy—she never forgot her duty to her beloved hometown.

Once I met her as a newly minted Ph.D., I used to be already a fervent admirer of her precise strategies and sharp mind, however I shortly came to know her as an expensive pal and mentor. Alice was funny, heat, beneficiant and welcoming, and these traits earned her deep respect—not only from those of us fortunate to call her a pal, but in addition from politicians and congressional employees on each side of the aisle. She was a consummate professional, a patriot, always reminding us that once we refuse to make use of proof in making coverage selections, we achieve this at our country’s peril.

Once I returned to Washington to hitch President Invoice Clinton’s Cabinet, Alice, along together with her good friend Meg Greenfield, the powerhouse editorial page editor of the Washington Submit, and Submit writer Katharine Graham, shaped what they referred to as the Sensible Ladies’s Membership. They invited me to hitch them in hilarious dinners with fascinating visitors.

I labored with Alice for years in several capacities, however my fondest reminiscences of her are from our time away from the political fortress of Washington. Someday in the 1980s, once I was nonetheless dwelling in New York, Alice referred to as me and asked if I might take a month off work to go to Kashmir and trek within the Himalayas. What followed was the journey of a lifetime and the start of many years of climbing with pals and her patient husband, Sid Winter, himself a world-class economist, in a few of the most fascinating locations on the earth.

You study quite a bit about individuals if you share a slender ledge in a rainstorm on a number of the highest mountains on the earth, and learning about Alice was its own adventure and its personal reward. She was tenacious and sharp, courageous and cheerful—and the kindest individual I have ever recognized.

Article initially revealed on POLITICO Magazine

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