Economists to look back on 2017, and ahead to 2018

Economists Louis Johnston and Chris Farrell will discuss the economy’s performance in 2017 and direction in 2018 at 7 p.m. Monday, Dec. 4, room 102, Art Center at Saint John’s University.

The event, “A Year-End Look at the Economy,” will be moderated by Gary Eichten ’69, and is free and open to the public. It is a presentation in the “On Campus with Gary Eichten” series.

“President (Donald) Trump took office in January 2017, so we’ll look at how the economy reacted to his proposals and to the policies enacted - and not enacted - by Congress and the state legislature,” said Johnston, professor of economics at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University.

“We’ll also peer into our cloudy crystal balls for some insight about the economy in 2018,” he added.

This is the fifth consecutive year Johnston and Farrell have presented this event on campus. They actually started doing a similar show in the late 2000s on Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), and Johnston, Farrell and Eichten have done programs together on MPR since 2004.

Johnston specializes in macroeconomics, economist history and the links between policy and history. Johnston was responsible for all the chapters on macroeconomics in the fourth and fifth editions of “Principles of Economics” by Robert Frank and Ben Bernanke, as well as the first and second editions of “Principles of Economics, Brief Edition.”

He also writes a column for MinnPost called “Macro, Micro and Minnesota” and is a regular guest and contributor on economic issues for MPR and WCCO Radio.

Farrell, an award-winning journalist, is senior economics contributor for Marketplace, a portfolio of programs produced and distributed by American Public Media. The Marketplace portfolio of shows are currently broadcast on 800 public radio stations nationwide and heard by more than 14 million listeners, and has the largest broadcast audience of any business news program (radio or television) in the country.

He is an economics commentator for MPR, and hosts “Conversations on the Creative Economy” and the “Unretirement” podcast. Farrell writes a biweekly unretirement column for Next Avenue, the PBS online magazine targeted at the 50-plus population. Farrell is a regular personal finance columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper, and a regular contributor on aging to the New York Times newspaper. His book, “Retirement: How Baby Boomers Are Changing the Way We Think about Work, Community, and the Good Life,” was published in the fall of 2014.

Hosting the discussion will be Eichten, MPR’s editor-at-large, whose prominent career in radio began in his undergraduate years as a student announcer at KSJR in Collegeville (MPR’s first station). A 2007 inductee into the Minnesota Broadcasting Hall of Fame, he hosted the “Midday” program on MPR for over 20 years before retiring from that position in 2012.

The Eugene McCarthy Center for Public Policy and Civic Engagement and the University Chair in Critical Thinking at SJU are co-sponsoring the event.