Cecilia Rouse - President Biden's powerful economic assistant

Advice to the generation

When she was just 4 years old, Cecilia Rouse’s parents told her about the assassination of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., the riots that tore through Washington, D.C., and the destruction of black businesses and neighborhoods. In a surviving family photo, Rouse and her younger sister stand next to a store with an old shingle roof and plywood painted with the words: “Many souls have worked here. Don’t put us out of work.”

Born on December 18, 1963, in Walnut Creek, California, Rouse was too young to understand what was happening in American society and the black community. But that message would later become the driving force for Cecilia Rouse’s decades-long career as a labor economist. Opportunities expanded when Rouse wasPresident Joe Bidenhighly regarded and selected for the top position on the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), where she will help steer the world's No. 1 economy through a recession and one that is considered the most unequal in modern American history.

Portrait of new Chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers Cecilia Rouse (CEA). Photo: NewsOne

Looking back to the early 1980s, when she entered Harvard University, student Rouse had no intention of studying economics until she took an economics course in her first year.High unemployment backdropThe economic climate of the United States at that time inspired Rouse to pursue a course in economics that focused on high unemployment. From this course, the young student discovered a set of principles about important economic and social issues that could be applied in real life. Recalling that time, Ms. Rouse later said that she could actually apply the set of rules to many areas of social life and was especially fond of the tools that economists use in the field of economics.

Multi-experience

Considered an economist with a mathematical mindset, Ms. Rouse is also particularly interested in social issues. This is also a family tradition when her father was one of the first African-American PhDs in Physics and her mother was a school psychologist. The qualities of a talented mathematical scientist and the social skills of a social psychologist have converged in Ms. Rouse. But surpassing her parents, economic and sociological issues have been viewed and contemplated by Ms. Rouse from a logical perspective of Mathematics with unexpected effectiveness.

After completing her doctorate at Harvard, Rouse became an assistant professor at Princeton University, where she spent 20 years, along with a year at the Russell Sage Foundation and three years working for government agencies in Washington, DC. A labor economist with a minor in the economics of education, Rouse has also studied the impact of education and training on the labor market. During her career, Rouse has had the opportunity to develop and diversify her expertise from labor economics to policy economics twice. In 1998, she served in the Clinton administration on the National Economic Council (NEC). Or from 2009-2011, she worked forPresident Barack Obama's administrationas a member of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA).

Unemployment and business closures are major challenges for Cecilia Rouse. Photo: NBC News

At the National Economic Council (NEC), Ms. Rouse helped coordinate economic policy for the current administration, a unique experience in which she learned to find policy solutions that could address a range of issues across multiple agencies and departments with different concerns. Also during her time at the NEC, she had one of her most rewarding periods working on a cherished immigration bill. At the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), she advised the President on unemployment-related policies during the deepest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. She studied the nature of unemployment and helped design policies to boost economic activity and support displaced workers.

Ms. Rouse also put her research into direct use when working on President Obama’s education policies. These include policies in the Student Aid and Financial Responsibility Act (SAFRA), which aimed to streamline the student loan process and financial aid programs for education. SAFRA also invested in colleges of color, community colleges, etc. Not only that, she also focused a lot of her enthusiasm on projects to support women, people of color who are disadvantaged in society, etc.

Heavy challenge

“Rouse is one of the nation’s most distinguished economists, an expert on labor economics, race, poverty, and education,” President Joe Biden said when he officially nominated her to lead the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). Having served two Democratic administrations and nearly 30 years of experience in academia, Ms. Rouse has received a lot of praise from lawmakers from both the Democratic and Republican parties. However, everyone understands that following the praise is a mountain of work and challenges. That is to effectively support the Joe Biden administration in dealing with the economic crisis that has left millions of people unemployed, thousands of small businesses forced to close and dissolve; at the same time, having to design a new future for the world’s number 1 economy. These will probably be the biggest challenges in Ms. Rouse’s life and career.

Ms. Rouse’s extensive experience in dealing with workers and vulnerable and at-risk groups in society will serve her well, analysts say. But once she heads a large body like the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), her expertise in labor economics will be limited when it comes to pressing, intertwined issues, such asCovid-19 crisis, health care, housing, financial reform, and international affairs. Moreover, her top colleagues on the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) such as Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey also have expertise focused on wages and inequality issues, while the top task now is to address competition issues and financial reform.

Cecilia Rouse and President Joe Biden's potential economic team. Photo: CNBC

The pressure is on for President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party to prove that they have a bold economic agenda that can rescue the US economy and the current unemployment rate. Of course, the unanimous passage of a $1.9 trillion rescue package by both houses of Congress that focuses on a national vaccine program, relief for businesses and local governments has helped the Biden administration “score points”.

However, that is not enough when the pandemic has killed about 400,000 Americans and continues to severely affect the economic recovery process. Another challenge is that in 2020, the reality is that more women lost their jobs than men, and it will take longer for women to re-employ their labor... Not to mention, only when a solid "foundation" is created for the domestic economy, can the US have enough strength to continue competing in the trade war with China, which is expected to be complicated!