Laurence Kotlikoff is an Economics professor at Boston University, but he is now also a third party presidential candidate. Kotlikoff announced that he intends to seek the nomination of the Americans Elect party.
“I think I may be the first economist to run for president,” Kotlikoff said. “We see economists now running Greece and Italy. It’s not everyday that an economist decides to work this way for his country — but I’m one of those cases.”
Kotlikoff has never before run for public office. His goal is to secure a place on the 2012 ballot as an independent through a new online nomination site, AmericansElect.org.
The nonpartisan group, which has raised $22 million so far, aims to put an alternative candidate on the ballot, chosen by online voters through a three-stage primary.
Kotlikoff is promoting a Purple Plan, designed to appeal to both “Red” Republicans and “Blue” Democrats, as well as anyone between. Kotlikoff’s website can be found here.
He and Americans Elect Chairman Peter Ackerman hung out together on the board of Cato’s Project on Social Security Choice:
http://www.socialsecurity.org/directors/board.html
The presidential candidates have mostly been “historians.”
Ron Paul might wish to mention “newsletters” as little as possible.
Is Kotlikoff an “economist by trade,” or just a “professor by trade”?
As the chairman of a bank, Roemer has to make economic predictions and forecasts to guide the bank’s policies.
(You could also argue Ron Paul was “an economist by trade” considering he wrote about and was paid for economics in a series of newsletters over several years.)
Economist Warren Mosler briefly ran for the Democratic Party’s 2012 presidential nomination.
Darcy Richardson would be a good person to answer the question of whether any previous presidential candidate has been an economist. No one knows more about the biographies of presidential candidates, especially the obscure ones, than he does.
To my knowledge, Roemer has never been an economist by trade.
Buddy Roemer has an Economics BA from Harvard and occasionally calls himself an economist.