Alan Stuart Blinder (, born October 14, 1945) is an American economics professor at Princeton University and is listed among the most influential economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. He is a leading macroeconomist, politically liberal, and a champion of Keynesian economics and policies. Binder served on President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers from January 1993 to June 1994 and as the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve from June 1994 to January 1996. His academic work has focused particularly on monetary policy and central banking, and on the "offshoring" of jobs. His writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, as well as a monthly column in The Wall Street Journal. Regarding the financial crisis of 2007–2008, Blinder drew ten lessons for fellow economists, including “It can happen here” and “Fraud and near-fraud can rise to attain macroeconomic significance.” Early life Blinder was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Syosset High School in Syosset, New York. Blinder attended Princeton University as an undergraduate student and graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in economics in 1967. He completed a 130-page long senior thesis, titled "The Theory of Corporate Choice". He received an MSc in economics from the London School of Economics in 1968 and received a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971. He was advised by Robert Solow. Professional life Academic career Blinder is the Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton where he has been since 1971; from 1988 to 1990, he chaired the economics department. Also in 1990, he founded Princeton's Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies. And he has served as vice-chair of The Observatory Group. Since 1978, Blinder has been a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a past president of the Eastern Economic Association and Vice President of the American Economic Association and was named a Distinguished Fellow of the latter in 2011. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1991), a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1996, and a member of the board of the Council on Foreign Relations (since 2008). Blinder's textbook Economics: Principles and Policy, co-written with William Baumol, was first published in 1979 and, in 2012 was printed in its twelfth edition. In 2009 Blinder