The recent Great Recession points to the large economic and humanitarian costs of business cycle downswings. We feel that monetary policymakers currently face political pressure to over-emphasize risks of inflation, relative to the suffering and lost output caused by unemployment. We seek to fund advocacy to emphasize the importance of the latter, and research and policy analysis to create better options for fiscal and monetary stabilization policy in the future. To the extent that better stabilization policy is possible, it could carry large humanitarian benefits, and the activities we’re interested in seem to receive little attention from other funders.

We do not currently have a full-time staff member dedicated to this cause. Alexander Berger [1] leads our grantmaking in this area.

For more on why we chose macroeconomic stabilization policy as a focus area, see our public cause report (May 2014) [2], used in our process for selecting focus areas [3].

Illustrative grants

A complete list of our grants in the area of macroeconomic stabilization policy can be found here [4]. Grants include:

• Employ America — General Support [5]
• Economic Policy Institute — Macroeconomic Policy Research (2018) [6]
• Center for Popular Democracy — Fed Up Campaign 2016 [7]
• Washington Center for Equitable Growth — Macroeconomic Policy Research [8]