White House Conference on the New Economy Panelists

WHITE HOUSE CONFERENCE ON THE NEW ECONOMY PANELISTS



  1. Is the New Economy Rewriting the Rules on Productivity and the Business Cycle?
    Abby Joseph Cohen, Chair Of Investment Policy Committee, Goldman, Sachs & Co.
    James K. Galbraith, Professor of Public Affairs and Government, University of Texas-Austin
    William D. Nordhaus, A Whitney Griswold Professor of Economics, Yale University
    Kim Polese, Co-Founder, President, CEO, Marimba, Inc.
    Roger C. Altman, Partner, Evercore Partners, Inc.
  2. Closing the Global Divide: Health, Education & Technology?
    Amartya Sen, Master, Trinity College, Cambridge University
    William H. Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
    Henry Cisneros, CEO, Univision, Inc.
    James D. Wolfensohn, President, World Bank
    Mirai Chatterjee, Secretary, Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) of India
    Robert F. Chase, President, National Education Association
  3. Can the New Economy Tools Empower Civil Society & Government?
    Robert D. Putnam, Stansfield Professor of International Peace, Harvard University
    Kaleil D. Isaza Tuzman, Co-Founder and CEO, govWorks.com
    Esther Dyson, Founder and Chairperson, Edventure Holdings, Inc.
    William Julius Wilson, Weiner Professor of Social Policy, JFK School, Harvard University





Roger C. Altman

Roger C. Altman began his career at Lehman Brothers as an investment banking associate and became a general partner of that firm in 1974, the youngest partner in Lehman's post-war history. Beginning in 1977, he served as Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for four years. He then returned to Lehman Brothers as senior partner responsible for business development. He later became co-head of overall investment banking and joined the Firm's Management Committee and its Board of Directors. He remained in those positions until the firm was sold to Shearson/American Express.

In 1987, Mr. Altman joined The Blackstone Group as Vice Chairman, head of the Firm's merger and acquisition advisory business and a member of its Investment Committee. Mr. Altman also had primary responsibility for Blackstone's international business, including cross-border joint ventures in four foreign markets, Germany, France, the UK, and Japan.

Beginning in January 1993, Mr. Altman returned to Washington to serve as Deputy Secretary of the US Treasury for two years. In mid-1995, he returned to private life, and formed Evercore Partners. The firm subsequently raised a $500 million banking fund for leveraged acquisitions. In its other role, as advisor, it has handled $23 billion of merger and acquisition transactions since inception.

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Abby Joseph Cohen

Abby Joseph Cohen is Managing Director and Chair of the Investment Policy Committee of Goldman, Sachs & Co. She is responsible for the firm's U.S. portfolio strategy. She joined the firm in 1990.

She had been with Drexel Burnham Lambert from 1983-90, serving as Chief Strategist in the last two years of her tenure. Earlier, she was Economist and Quantitative Research Director for T. Rowe Price Associates. Ms. Cohen began her career as an economist at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC.

Ms. Cohen holds degrees in economics from Cornell University and the George Washington University. She is a Trustee Fellow of Cornell University and serves on the Board of Overseers of the Weill Cornell Medical College. She recently served as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Association for Investment Management and Research (AIMR) and as Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts (ICFA). She is a member of the Investment Committee of the Museum of Modern Art.

Ms. Cohen has made numerous television appearances and is frequently quoted in the financial press. Ms. Cohen was the 1997 inductee into the Wall $treet Week Hall of Fame. She is ranked first in U.S. Portfolio Strategy by Institutional Investor Magazine and by Greenwich Associates.

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James K. Galbraith

James K. Galbraith teaches economics and a variety of other subjects at the LBJ School and UT Austin's Department of Government. He holds degrees from Harvard (B.A. magna cum laude, 1974) and Yale (Ph.D. in economics, 1981). He studied economics as a Marshall Scholar at King's College, Cambridge in 1974-1975, and then served in several positions on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 1985. He directed the LBJ School's Ph.D. Program in Public Policy from 1995 to 1997. He is currently the Director of University of Texas Inequality Project.

Galbraith served as Chief Technical Adviser to the State Planning Commission, P.R. China, on a project on macroeconomic reform from 1994 to 1997. He has co-authored two textbooks, The Economic Problem with Robert L. Heilbroner and Macroeconomics with William Darity, Jr., as well as Balancing Acts: Technology, Finance and the American Future.

Galbraith's book, Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay, was published by the Free Press in August 1998. His new book, Inequality and Industrial Change: A Global View (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2000), is co-edited with Maureen Berner and features contributions from six LBJ School Ph.D. students.

Galbraith maintains several outside connections, including serving as a Senior Scholar of the Jerome Levy Economics Institute and as chair of Economists Allied for Arms Reduction (ECAAR). He also writes a column on economic and political issues for the Texas Observer.

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William D. Nordhaus

William D. Nordhaus is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Economics at Yale University. He completed his undergraduate work at Yale University and received his Ph.D. in economics in 1967 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been on the faculty of Yale University since 1967.

From 1977 to 1979, he was a Member of the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers. From 1986 to1988 he served as the Provost of Yale University, and from 1992 to 1993 he was the Vice President for Finance and Administration at the university. He is a member and senior advisor of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, Washington, DC and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Nordhaus is current or past editor of a number of scientific journals and has served on the executive committees of the American Economic Association and the Eastern Economic Association.

He is the author of many books, among them Invention, Growth and Welfare, Is Growth Obsolete?; The Efficient Use of Energy Resources; Reforming Federal Regulation; Managing the Global Commons; and (joint with Paul Samuelson) the classic textbook, Economics, now in its sixteenth edition. His research has focused on economic growth and natural resources, as well as the question of the extent to which resources constrain economic growth, with pioneering work beginning in the 1970s on the economics of global warming. Professor Nordhaus has also undertaken studies in wage and price behavior, augmented national accounting, the political business cycle, productivity, and the costs and benefits of regulation. Recently, his work has focussed on the economics of global warming, including the construction of integrated and scientific models to determine the efficient path for coping with climate change.

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Kim Polese

Kim Polese, President, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Marimba, Inc., a leading provider of Internet infrastructure management solutions.

Prior to co-founding Marimba, Ms. Polese spent more than seven years at Sun Microsystems and was the original product manager for Java. During her tenure at Sun, she played a pivotal role in the strategic definition, direction and launch of Java. Prior to joining Sun, Ms. Polese worked for IntelliCorp Inc., consulting with companies in the development of expert system application frameworks.

She holds a Bachelors degree in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley and studied Computer Science at the University of Washington, Seattle. A noted and respected industry speaker, Ms. Polese has been named one of Time Magazine's Top 25 Most Influential People in America, one of Red Herring's Top 20 Entrepreneurs, and one of Computer Reseller News' Top 25 Executives.

Ms. Polese is a member of the Board of Directors of TechNet, a bipartisan coalition of digital-economy executives focused on strengthening America's leadership in the new economy. She is also an Advisory Board member of W.I.T.I. (Women in Technology International), the premier association dedicated to advancing women in technology, and GirlGeeks, the career and training community for aspiring young women in computing. In addition, Ms. Polese is on the board of Do Something, a non-profit organization that inspires, trains, funds and mobilizes young people to become leaders in their communities.

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Robert F. Chase

Robert F. Chase, a leading advocate for public education, is president of the 2.5 million-member National Education Association (NEA). His focus is on recreating the NEA as the champion of quality teaching and quality public schools in the United States. These efforts, described as "new unionism," stress collaboration and cooperation, risk-taking, and personal responsibility for school quality. A social studies teacher for 25 years from Danbury, CT, Bob Chase is chair of the executive board of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education and a member of the boards of the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future.

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Mirai Chatterjee

Ms. Chatterjee is the Secretary of the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA). SEWA is an Indian NGO that has made important improvements for women working in the informal sector and is known for its work on women's empowerment issues.

Formed in 1972, SEWA's purpose is to organize and improve the income and social status of poor self-employed women. SEWA has three primary activities: a trade union with a membership of 220,000 women working in the informal sector; a cooperative; and support services for women. SEWA also runs a bank that provides credit services to union members and has about 75,000 depositors and borrowers. A SEWA affiliate, the Gujarat Mahila Housing SEWA trust, provides a range of services on housing including technical assistance, market information, information on accessing municipal services, and advocacy for women's access to and ownership of shelter. Also, SEWA's slum Networking Project provided water, toilets, and access-ways to slum settlements.

About 40 percent of the city's population lives in slums and squatter settlements that are undeserved or lack infrastructure services like water, toilets, and drainage which results in grave health consequences. Currently, USAID is supporting SEWA on improving the accessibility of poor urban households to basic services such as primary health services, water, drainage, and sanitation facilities.

From 1978-1982, Ms. Chatterjee attended Harvard University. 1983-1985, she attended the School of Hygiene and Public Health, Johns Hopkins University.

Ms. Chatterjee participated in a meeting with President Clinton during his visit to Mumbai. She eloquently articulated how the new economy and globalization are affecting the lives of common people in India. Also, Mrs. Clinton visited SEWA headquarters during her visit to India in 1995.

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Henry G. Cisneros

Henry Cisneros is President and CEO of Univision, Inc,. Mr. Cisneros joined the company in January of 1997. From January 1993 through January 1997, Mr. Cisneros was the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

As a member of the President's Cabinet, Secretary Cisneros was assigned America's housing and community development portfolio. Prior to joining the cabinet, he was Chairman of Cisneros Asset Management Company, a national fixed income money management firm.

In 1981, Mr. Cisneros became the first Hispanic mayor of a major U.S. city when he was elected Mayor of San Antonio, the nation's 10th largest city. As a four-term mayor--from 1981 to 1989--Mr. Cisneros rebuilt the city's economic base and created jobs through massive infrastructure and downtown improvements in San Antonio.

Mr. Cisneros has served as President of the National League of Cities, Chairman of the National Civic League, Deputy Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and as a board member of the Rockefeller Foundation.

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William H. Gates

William (Bill) H. Gates is chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation, a leading provider of software for the personal computer worldwide. Microsoft had revenues of $19.75 billion for the fiscal year ending June 1999, and employs more than 32,000 people in 60 countries.

Gates' foresight and vision regarding personal computing have been central to the success of Microsoft and the software industry. Gates is actively involved in key management and strategic decisions at Microsoft, and plays an important role in the technical development of new products. A significant portion of his time is devoted to meeting with customers and staying in contact with Microsoft employees around the world through e-mail.

Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft's mission has been to continually advance and improve software technology and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. The company is committed to a long-term view, reflected in its investment of more than $3 billion on research and development in the current fiscal year.

In 1999, Gates wrote Business @ the Speed of Thought, a book that shows how digital processes can solve business problems in fundamentally new ways. Co-authored by Collins Hemingway, the book was published in 25 languages and is available in more than 60 countries. Business @ the Speed of Thought has received wide critical acclaim and was listed on the best-seller lists the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and Amazon.com. Gates' previous book, The Road Ahead, was published in 1995.

In addition to his passion for computers, Gates is interested in biotechnology. He sits on the board of the Icos Corporation and is a shareholder in Darwin Molecular, a subsidiary of British-based Chiroscience. He also founded Corbis Corporation, which is developing one of the largest resources of visual information in the world – a comprehensive digital archive of art and photography from public and private collections around the globe. Gates also has invested with cellular telephone pioneer Craig McCaw in Teledesic, a company that is working on an ambitious plan to launch hundreds of low-orbit satellites around the globe to provide worldwide two-way broadband telecommunications service.

Bill and Melinda Gates have endowed a foundation with more than $17 billion to support philanthropic initiatives in the areas of global health and learning, with the hope that as we move into the 21st century, advances in these critical areas will be available for all people. To date, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $300 million to organizations working in global health; and more than $300 million to improve learning opportunities, including the Gates Library Initiative to bring computers, Internet Access and training to public libraries in low-income communities in the United States and Canada.

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James Wolfensohn

James D. Wolfensohn, the World Bank Group's ninth president since 1946, established his career as an international investment banker with a parallel involvement in development issues and the global environment. Since becoming president in June of 1995, he has traveled to more than 100 countries to gain first-hand experience of the challenges facing the World Bank, and its 181 member countries.

On September 27, 1999, Mr. Wolfensohn was unanimously reappointed by the Bank's Board of Executive Directors to a second five-year term as president beginning June 1, 2000. This will make him the third president in World Bank history to serve a second term.

During his travels, Mr. Wolfensohn has not only visited development projects supported by the World Bank, but he has also met with the Bank's government clients as well as with representatives from business, labor, media, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), religious and women's groups, students and teachers. In the process he has taken the initiative in forming new strategic partnerships between the Bank and the governments it serves, the private sector, civil society, regional development banks and the UN.

Prior to joining the Bank, Mr. Wolfensohn was an international investment banker. His last position was as President and Chief Executive Officer of James D. Wolfensohn Inc., his own investment firm set up in 1981 to advise major U.S. and international corporations.

Before setting up his own company, Mr. Wolfensohn held a series of senior positions in finance. He was Executive Partner of Salomon Brothers in New York and head of its investment banking department. He was Executive Deputy Chairman and Managing Director of Schroders Ltd. in London, President of J. Henry Schroders Banking Corporation in New York, and Managing Director, Darling & Co. of Australia.

In 1990, Mr. Wolfensohn became Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. and on January 1, 1996, he was elected Chairman Emeritus.

Born in Australia in December 1933, Mr. Wolfensohn is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He holds B.A. and LL.B. degrees from the University of Sydney and a M.B.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Business.

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Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson has devoted her life to discovering the inevitable and promoting the possible. As an investor/commentator, she focuses on emerging technologies, emerging markets and emerging companies. In 1994, she was one of the first to explore the impact of the Internet on intellectual property and in 1997, she wrote a book on the impact of the internet on individuals' lives, Release 2.0: A Design For Living In The Digital Age.

Dyson is the chairman of EDventure Holdings which publishes the influential monthly computer-industry newsletter, Release 1.0, and sponsors two of the industry's premier conferences, PC Forum in the US and EDventure's High-Tech Forum in Europe. As chairman, she leads ICANN, the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, a new international agency charged with setting policy for the Internet's core infrastructure independent of government control.

After graduating from Harvard in economics, Dyson began her serious career in 1974 as a fact-checker for Forbes and quickly rose to reporter. In 1977 she joined New Court Securities as "the research department", following Federal Express and other start-ups. After a stint at Oppenheimer covering software companies, she moved to Rosen Research and in 1983 bought the company from her employer Ben Rosen, and renamed it EDventure Holdings.

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Robert D. Putnam

Robert D. Putnam is Stanfield Professor of International Peace at Harvard University. He has served as chairman of Harvard's Department of Government, Director of the Center for International Affairs, and Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is author or co-author of seven books and more than thirty scholarly articles published in ten languages, including Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993); Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics (1993); Hanging Together: The Seven-Power Summits (1984); Comparative Study of Political Elites (1976); and Beliefs of Politicians (1973). Putnam served on the staff of the National Security Council. His current research on American democracy will appear in a forthcoming book, Bowling Alone: Civic Disengagement in America and What To Do About It.

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Kaleil D. Isaza Tuzman

Kaleil D. Isaza Tuzman is Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of govWorks,Inc., the leading e-government Internet services provider. Recently named one of Interactive Week magazines, "Top 25 Unsung Heroes of the Net," Mr. Isaza Tuzman has established himself as one of the foremost experts and leaders in the e-government space.

In his capacity as govWorks CEO, he has been successful in developing strong client relationships with government entities across the country, raising significant capital, forging high-level corporate partnerships, securing a top-notch management team, and establishing a well-respected Board of Directors and Board of Advisors. Mr. Isaza Tuzman's personal relationships and experience in the financial world have been instrumental in securing funding for the company. He directed the company's successful second round financing effort, which was completed in November 1999, raising over $18 million from investors including the Mayfield Fund, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., the New York City Investment Fund, Sapient, Vignette and Hearst New Media. In early 2000, Mr. Isaza Tuzman structured broad strategic relationships with American Management Systems and Arthur Andersen, and raised an additional $39 million for govWorks expansion. In addition, he has provided strategic direction for the Company, developed an aggressive international strategy and formed relationships with other best-of-breed technology companies that support the company's business model in both the US and abroad.

Prior to founding govWorks, Mr. Isaza Tuzman worked as an Associate in the Risk Arbitrage Group at Goldman, Sachs & Co. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in Government and a certificate in Latin American Studies. In addition, he serves on several start-up technology company Boards, the Alumni Steering Committees of Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO), a not-for-profit organization that places minority college students in corporate summer internships, and is on the Board of Junior Achievement.

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William Julius Wilson

William Julius Wilson is the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. Only 17 of Harvard's professors currently hold University Professorships, Harvard's highest professorial distinction. After receiving the Ph.D. from Washington State University in 1966, Wilson taught sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1972. In 1990 he was appointed the Lucy Flower University Professor and director of the University of Chicago's Center for the Study of Urban Inequality. He joined the faculty at Harvard in July of 1996.

Past President of the American Sociological Association, Wilson has received 32 honorary degrees, including honorary doctorates from Princeton, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, and the University of Amsterdam in Holland. A MacArthur Prize fellow from 1987 to 1992, Wilson has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and the American Philosophical Society. Finally, he is a recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the United States.

He is the author of numerous publications, including The Declining Significance of Race, winner of the American Sociological Association's Sydney Spivack Award; The Truly Disadvantaged, which received The Washington Monthly Annual Book Award and the Society for the Study of Social Problems' C. Wright Mills Award; and When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, which received the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award. His latest book is The Bridge over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics.

Other honors granted to Wilson include the Seidman Award in Political Economy (the first and only noneconomist to receive the Award); the Golden Plate Achievement Award; the Distinguished Alumnus Award, Washington State University; the American Sociological Association's Award for Public Understanding of Sociology; Burton Gordon Feldman Award ("for outstanding contributions in the field of public policy") Brandeis University; and the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Award (granted by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Los Angeles).

Professor Wilson is a member of numerous national boards and commissions, including the President's Commission on White House Fellowships, The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and The Century Foundation.

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What's New - April 2000

President Clinton's New Markets Trip: From Digital Divide to Digital Opportunity

Keeping Guns Away from Youth and Criminals

Maryland's Landmark New Gun Safety Law

President Clinton Will Urge Congress to Pass a Budget That Invests in Key Priorities - April 13, 2000

Proclamation - National D.A.R.E. Day, 2000

President Clinton Touts Education Reform Agenda - April 14, 2000

White House Conference on Teenagers: Raising Responsible & Resourceful Youth

Families USA Report Validates the Need for a Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit

Womens Office Celebrates Take Our Daughters to Work Day

President Clinton Announces Gun Buyback Partnership with the District of Columbia

President Clinton Releases New Prescription Drug Coverage & Study, April 10, 2000

A National Call to Action to Close the Digital Divide

Proclamantion: National Crime Victims' Rights Week, 2000

From Digital Divide to Digital Opportunity: A National Call to Action

The White House Conference on the New Economy Agenda

Conference on the New Economy Panelists

The White House Conference on the New Economy Participants

As a First Step Towards Social Security Reform, April 7, 2000

Proclamation: National Volunteer Week, 2000

Proclamation: Pan American Day & Pan American Week, 2000

Proclamation: National Former Prisoner of War Recognition Day, 2000


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