Day: July 9, 2019

There was much about Elizabeth Warren that I didn’t know, and what I’ve learned, I’ll list later in this post, which is about Antonia Felix’s book Elizabeth Warren, Her Fight, Her Work, Her Life.
You can read a review here.

The most important things I learned: (less important list at the end)

1. I knew she was a top notch scholar. But, if anything, I underestimated how good she is. Wow…let’s put it this way: Harvard recruited her to come as a full professor. That means “world class.”

2. On pages 70-72, we find that Warren, now a law professor at the University of Houston, attended a seminar on law and economics, run by the Olin Foundation. It was to teach economics to law professors, with the underlying goal, according to the foundation, to make law professors more conservative. At the time, Warren was a Republican. There, she studied and learned the principles of conservative thought on economics and, eventually, used what she learned to fight against that approach to economics!

Ah…if we had more of that these days; LEARNING the other side’s best arguments, even if it is to learn how to better fight against them. But…all too often we find some kook on the other side to lampoon. But I am digressing.

Anyway, there is much more there…and no, the “nevertheless, she persisted” incident isn’t described, her early days in the Senate are. And yes, there is a discussion of her “Native American heritage” claims.

At times, the book is too much like a cheer leading book, but there is a lot of solid fact there.

1. She grew up in Oklahoma, and won a Betty Crocker competition in high school.
2. She was on the debate team in high school and later in college (first was George Washington University).
3. She dropped out of college to get married. Warren is the surname of her first husband, who she ended up divorcing.
4. Undergraduate degree: University of Houston (where she finished)
5. Law degree: Rutgers. She taught there, and later at UH.
6. She spent time teaching law (and doing scholarship) at Rutgers, Houston, University of Texas, Penn, and finally at Harvard. She was RECRUITED to join the faculty at Harvard as a full professor.
7. Our time and Texas briefly overlapped.
8. She was a Republican for much of her early life and remains a staunch capitalist..she is for regulated capitalism NOT socialism.
9. She appears to like men’s legs (noticed that on her second husband) Yeah, that is fluff, but so what.

there is much more that I already knew e. g. her overseeing the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which came about as part of Dodd-Frank. Note that at the time, there weren’t many universal protections for those using financial products.