It’s a hot August afternoon when Gregory Hess navigates his way around The Claremont Colleges in his car, admiring the architecture while on his way for coffee. Back in his office in Bauer, boxes await unpacking. It’s nearly two weeks before classes begin, and Hess, CMC’s inaugural Russell S. Bock Chair of Public Economics and Taxation, has been in Claremont for half that time. In Ohio for the past four years as Oberlin College’s Danforth-Lewis Professor of Economics, Hess is readjusting to California--particularly the southern part, but it’s not his introduction to the state. Hess grew up in San Francisco and graduated with honors from the University of California, Davis, with a bachelor’s degree in economics.

“One thing I learned how to do living in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and England is how to parallel park,” says Hess. “I’m a great parallel-parker.” A swift turn of the wheel and the point is proven when the professor occupies a downtown curbside spot with deft precision.

With a remarkable resume in economics, Hess’ talents clearly aren’t limited to visual-spatial skills behind the wheel. In 1998 he became the youngest member of the Federal Reserve Board Shadow Open Market Committee. He has served as an economist at the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C., and as a visiting scholar at its regional banks in Kansas City and Cleveland; co-edited the textbook, Intranational Macroeconomics; and has a stellar teaching record that includes former posts at Cambridge University, the University of Kansas, and St. John’s College.

Hess says he is looking forward to being part of CMC’s distinguished economic's department. “CMC has an extremely fine reputation. The students seem to possess that rare combination of being very directed, and having a tremendously strong set of fundamental skills and an ability to translate their desires into tangible actions,” he said.

“There’s also a greater sense that people want a hands-on approach to education, and I think that’s something I can provide,” Hess says.

Hess is teaching macroeconomics and will add an annual course in public finance. Hess’ students reap the benefit of his current work with the Shadow Open Market Committee, a watchdog group that was started in the 1970s by a “group of people who thought that the Federal Reserve Board was making a lot of mistakes, and that there wasn’t a strong, coordinated voice to give direction as to where the Fed should move,” Hess says.

Like European shadow committees (Hess was on the U.K.’s Shadow Monetary Policy Committee for a year in 1997), the groups exist to “give a stronger, principled approach to how monetary policy should be made,” he says. “It’s enjoyable to talk about economics in a very specific, concrete way that academics don’t usually talk about it,” Hess says of his work on the committee. “Usually, academics have the luxury of taking their time and thinking about things, whereas policy makers typically have to respond much more quickly. So it’s been enjoyable.”

The committee meets twice annually, and one of the greater tasks, the one sure to benefit Hess’ students, is filtering through news on a daily basis, and extracting what’s most important regarding policy. In other words, determining what’s “signal,” and what’s “noise,” as academics say. “You have to consider yourself a miner, looking for gold nuggets. You have to use the right filter to extract the important aspects that you’re looking for. It’s the toughest thing, and you still have to remember that there are some deep fundamental principles that you learn in economics,” he says. “And you can never let go of those.”

Professor Hess says anyone can be a "talking head" in economics because of the wealth of information online and elsewhere. "But the real trick is being able to see the whole picture and sort out what's important."

About Russell Bock: The Bock Chair was funded by Russell S. Bock of Santa Barbara, Calif., with a gift to CMC in late 1999. Bock also has made commitments for additional gifts through his, and his wife's, estates. He was a member of the CMC Board of Trustees in the 1960s and left the Board when he retired as managing partner of Ernst & Ernst in the western United States in 1970. Bock wrote the initial Guide to Taxes in the 1950s, and remains a consultant on the annual project. Bock, who turns 97 in November, recently hosted Professor Hess for lunch in Montecito.