Our whole conference has been about anomalies. Some of those anomalies are pretty fundamental. Why has G.D.P. growth been slow? Why has the labor force participation rate come down so much? Why haven’t we hit 2 percent inflation more quickly? Those are all really interesting questions for an academic. For a policy maker you actually have to make a determination with imperfect information about what the answers to those questions are. So an academic gets to work on exciting ideas and there’s not much cost to being wrong. Anybody who’s in a policy-making role knows there is cost and so that makes it more challenging.

Source: Q. and A. With Eric Rosengren: The Danger of Low Unemployment – The New York Times