At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on February 2, 2021, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Martin Stuart Feldstein, was placed upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
Martin Feldstein, who taught at Harvard for more than half a century, was one of the most influential economists of our era. His scientific contributions, spanning an astonishing number of applied fields, pointed the way to new areas of inquiry and new ways of carrying out research that countless economists followed. He advised numerous U.S. presidents and other public officials, serving as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Reagan administration, on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under the second President Bush, and on President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. His economic ideas, in key ways a departure from what had prevailed since World War II, came to represent mainstream American economic policy thinking. And through his leadership of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) he reshaped the research structure of the economics profession and with it the regular activities of thousands of his fellow economists.