Profile of Emi Nakamura: Questiong Assumptions
Peter Walker profiles Prof Emi Nakamura of Univ of Berkeley.
Considered one of Emi Nakamura’s favourite motion pictures rising up in Alberta, Canada, was the 1987 docudrama The Race for the Double Helix. Quick-paced and infectious in its enthusiasm for the scientific technique, it tells the story of how James Watson and Francis Crick found the construction of DNA. “There’s nothing worse than a fallacious truth,” quips Crick within the film, exasperated by all the wrong theories clouding his considering (earlier than Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray photographs of DNA led him and Watson down the correct path). It’s a quote that Emi remembers her economist mother and father repeating to emphasise the significance of sound knowledge.
Now a professor of economics on the College of California, Berkeley, the 42-year-old Nakamura is greatest identified for investigating macroeconomic questions utilizing micro knowledge—knowledge that present details about traits of particular person folks, households, and companies. She has lengthy been seen as a rising star in economics. In 2018, The Economist listed her among the many decade’s eight greatest younger economists. A 12 months later she gained the John Bates Clark Medal—awarded to essentially the most influential American economist below the age of 40—for her analysis on fiscal stimulus and worth stickiness, a measure of how typically costs change.