Meeting the World's Economic Leaders

With less than a month left, I’ve reached the home stretch! After a fairly relaxing day on Saturday, Sunday I went to the Holocaust Museum. Making the Holocaust Museum the only museum for the weekend was certainly the right idea. It takes one through the history of the Holocaust, from Hitler’s rise to power through his “final solution” to the Allied liberation. While going through the museum, each person is given a booklet with the name and story of a person who lived and died in the Holocaust. This certainly changes the experience because, although we often are saddened and are taken aback by the millions of people that lost their lives, we rarely consider the personal side of it, with each of the millions of people having their own back-story and specific personality. As the museum is already depressing, the employees are sure to remind guests to simply follow along on the story of their person, but not to imagine themselves as that person as they are taken through how that person’s life played out. While all of this was certainly memorable, the lasting memory for me would be the smell in many of the rooms. It was difficult to describe, but it’s almost like one could smell the sadness and gravity of the things in each room.

            On a much more fun note, my internship was awesome this week! I spent the beginning of the week looking into the administrative costs of many of the 80 federal anti-poverty programs. As we spend more than $1 trillion on anti-poverty programs, you can imagine the administrative costs were correspondingly high. However, I did not have a lot of time to do my traditional work this week, as we had a plethora of seminars and conferences this week. Wednesday morning, we spent in a résumé and interview workshop, which was certainly interesting. Then, Wednesday afternoon, Cato’s former president and CEO, John Allison, spoke to us about leadership and his book, The Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure. Mr. Allison was certainly a cool person, with his backwoods North Carolina accent contrasting with his business and leadership acumen to make the talk both interesting and entertaining. However, while all of this was cool, the highlight of my week at my internship was, without question, working Cato’s annual Monetary Conference. As this is

With the original JT

Cato’s most prestigious event, many world-renowned government officials and professors were in attendance, such as 3 regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents, 2 international central bank presidents, and multiple well-known professors. While meeting many of these people was cool, nothing was better than meeting John Taylor, one of my favorite economists. Dr. Taylor is an economist at Stanford and the Hoover Institution and one of the world’s leading experts in monetary economics. Meeting him, and having a short conversation before his speech, was one of the highlights of my internship.

Story of the Week: At long last, I FOUND THE GOOD SWEET TEA! While Arizona sweet tea can be bought for about $4 per can here, I had yet to find some tasty and cheap sweet tea. However, I went to a different grocery store on Friday. After getting my groceries, I noticed that, on an aisle toward the front of the store, there seemed to be a glowing light, like one coming from the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. After turning the corner and finding it to be the glorious beverage, I’m fairly certain I could hear angels, softly singing “Hallelujah.” Needless to say, it was a glorious moment.