Foxnews.com is reporting that the Bush administration has just hired Greg Mankiw as its new head of the president's Council of Economic Advisers.

Although Mankiw is one the architects of the "New Keynesian" school of economics, in this article by Mark Skousen (ex-President of the Foundation for Economic Education), Mankiw's undergraduate text gets a mention as one the "best textbooks for a free-market university", primarily because it does not mention the Keynesian aggregate demand/aggregate supply framework until chapter 31.

But don't expect Mankiw's appointment - by itself - to make much difference to the US economy. His Harvard colleague Robert Barro (whose own 800-page Macroeconomics textbook introduces the Keynesian model on page 757) once found (see Chapter 3, "Economic Advisers and Economic Outcomes") that "economic outcomes and the credentials of the chairperson of the council are uncorrelated", although Barro recently seems to have changed his mind on this hypothesis.