Valentin Bolotnyy, a Kleinheinz Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, has been named to the California Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors, becoming one of only eight California academics to serve on it. He spoke to Hoover’s Chris Herhalt about what the appointment means and where he sees discussions going.
Chris Herhalt:
What do you think about your career to date demonstrated to this council that you'd be a good fit?
Valentin Bolotnyy:
The objectives of the council are to provide outside academic expert advice to the governor's office on a whole host of issues that are affecting the state of California. And that covers the whole gamut, right? Housing and homelessness, addiction, mental health, wildfire risk, entrepreneurship, business development questions. So, you can see the range of folks there from all parts of the state, all sorts of universities from the south and the north and all around the state. And there are also a couple of members on the council who are part of the administration; the lieutenant governor is on the council, for example, as well.
So, the objective is to cover the whole gamut of issues, provide outside academic advice on these issues. And partly it's what's top of mind for the governor's office where they want that kind of weigh-in. And partly it's what do we as a group think the governor's office should be particularly attuned to in the coming months. And so those are the two pieces of the puzzle that we're working on. In terms of what I think made me a particularly interesting candidate for the group, I've been at Hoover for over five years now in this position as Kleinheinz fellow and as Hoover fellow. And that position has allowed me to work on a whole wide range of public policy issues. So you took a look at the scaling auctions paper. That's an infrastructure project, but I've also worked on a lot of mental health and health-related questions.
I've worked on climate adaptation projects. I've worked on personnel economics, scheduling questions, and working on education and child care now and through our partnerships with Alabama, and all of these projects are in partnership with a state and local partner. So they're very much, whether it's Pennsylvania or Alabama or Tennessee or Texas, we're working with state and local administrative data and addressing questions that are top of mind for state and local agencies and officials. So that has given me both the breadth that I think is valuable for the council and the fact that I've been able to go and work directly with these state and local entities, which is very much what's at play here in California and in this role. The objective of the council is to figure out how the governor's office can best serve the citizens of the state and address the issues that are keeping our public officials up at night in California.
Chris Herhalt:
Why do you think they would turn to someone from Hoover, where there has been some criticism of Governor Newsom's policies?
Valentin Bolotnyy:
I think it's a compliment to whoever was making these decisions of who to include on the council that there's a value for a whole range of opinions and a whole range of backgrounds and people coming from all sorts of different parts of the state. There've been, like I said, they're academics from a whole host of different universities across the state, and they want someone from Stanford as well. They're not afraid of having someone from Hoover.
And I think it's heartening to me that it didn't scare them off, and I think it's healthy. I think it's very healthy to have. I'm certainly aware of those different perspectives and I'll be able to bring them up as appropriate in these discussions and in all these ways, but my objective is to do it constructively and helpfully, and I think perhaps they felt that that would be the case. So yeah, the other thing is, the construction of the council is interesting because it doesn't sit within the governor's office, it sits in the Department of Finance, and it is also not called Governor Newsom's Council of Economic Advisors. They're actively calling it the Governor's Council of Economic Advisors, emphasizing the fact that, whoever the governor is, we want this entity of independent academics being able to weigh in. And so, it is not a political appointment in the way that the (Council of Economic Advisors) at the White House would be. Right? And I think they're still trying to figure out, honestly, they're still trying to figure out exactly what this looks like, what the (council) looks like, what its structure is, and what its objectives are. About how often do we meet? These meetings are remote, we're meeting once a quarter in person, but otherwise the meetings are remote and everyone's volunteering, it's not like someone's getting appointed and paid to do this. So in the structure itself, there is this built-in mechanism of, we want as objective and as apolitical of a range of opinions weighing in as possible, regardless of who's in office, which I think, fundamentally, that's good.
Chris Herhalt:
I've had the opportunity to twice sit in on Josh D. Rauh's presentation where he goes through the tax changes in the state of California and the related exit of high-income, high-net-worth individuals out of the state. Now, I know you can't get into detail of what goes on, but is that something that they're aware of that you might talk about, or is that too critical or not on their radar?
Valentin Bolotnyy:
I don't think anything is off the table for discussions in there. And really, there are things that are coming from the governor's office, but there are also things that the council members can bring up and bring to the attention of the governor's office. I would be very surprised if they weren’t already aware of Josh's work and Josh's findings. But if the conversation turns to those kinds of issues, I will have no qualms about bringing up his work and his findings and encouraging the council to integrate it into its thinking and its recommendations.
Chris Herhalt:
From this past meeting and from everything you've received so far, what do you think the governor's office views as their main challenge right now? Or is it just confronting multiple?
Valentin Bolotnyy:
I will just say that these issues that I brought up earlier, anything that you would think of that … And I'll say personally, what I'm excited about, potentially thinking about is questions that I've worked on, which is questions that I'm actively working on currently with Allegheny County in Pennsylvania. We're actively working on mental health and involuntary hospitalization. The care courts in California have just gone into effect, and there's a lot there that I want to focus on. And it's related to the serious homelessness issues across the state. It's related to the opioid crisis that we have in the state, as we do across the country. Those are the issues that you see in the press, and what the governor's doing, it is top of the agenda. It's also something that I'm particularly interested in and passionate about, but there's a whole wide range of issues additionally that are very much things that the council is, I think, expected to be ready to address.
Chris Herhalt:
Is this a term or is this at will? What have you been told to expect?
Valentin Bolotnyy:
That's a good question. And I think it's partly, it's still … the council structures and way of working is still a work in progress. I don't think in the documents that I've signed, there's no particular term limit.
And the folks who—I think Laura Tyson heads up the council, and I think she was heading it up when it was initially created in 2020. That's another thing that's interesting about it. Governor Newsom created this, it didn't exist beforehand, and he created it right before the pandemic hit in 2020. So it's a pretty new entity, and there's been a little bit of turnover in members, but there've also been folks who've been there from 2020 who are still on the council.
Chris Herhalt:
What do you think you’ll get out of this appointment, professionally?
Valentin Bolotnyy:
I am genuinely most excited about the ability to bridge the gap between my research, the research being done at Hoover, and just the body of research out there on these major issues facing society, facing California and the policymakers who are making those decisions. One of the things that I'm a part of—the State and Local Research Initiative that heads up through our work there and through this annual conference that we've been running at Hoover, we're doing it again. It'll be the second time that we do it, we'll do it in January, a conference on collaborative state and local policy research.
My passion in getting that off the ground and in seeing it become an annual thing is to get academics and policymakers in the same room thinking about these issues collaboratively and spreading widely from this grassroots level, from a laboratories-of-democracy level across the nation, learning about what works and what doesn't. And I'm really excited about that potential with this role, and it's what I would love to see happen across the nation. So if there are states or even localities that don't have mechanisms that feed in naturally academic research into their thinking and their decision making, I would love to see that happen.
I would love to see that come about. And I think the CEA [Council of Economic Advisors] in [Washington] DC—I would hope for them to also … That's why it exists, right? It's to feed academic research into decision making. So that's my passion and what I really believe in as an economist will really make the world a better place. What does that mean for me professionally? Honestly, right now, as long as I feel like I can continue to spread the gospel of the value of this approach, I will feel fulfilled and like I'm doing meaningful work. So I don't know what kinds of doors it opens up professionally, but as long as those doors help me continue this line of integration of academic research into public policy, I'll be happy.
Chris Herhalt:
Do you think your appointment to this council might open the door for more collaboration between Hoover and the state or any municipality in California on different projects?
Valentin Bolotnyy:
Yeah, I would love for that to happen, and I'll certainly be looking for opportunities for that to happen. I think the council's job is a little bit more rapid-fire than a deep research project that might take a year-plus to get results would be, but there surely will be things that come up that require deeper dives, and I'll be eager to try to collaborate with agencies at the state level and at the local level on research. Absolutely.
