Timothy Taylor has a helpful obituary. Brookings has a useful intellectual bio.

She was the first director of the Congressional Budget Office. She was a straight shooter and highly competent, and that is how the CBO is regarded to this day. The reputation of the CBO is, if anything, too good. See my essay, The Congressional Budget Office and the Demand for Pseudoscience.

She had various connections in the economics profession, most notably with some very nice economists at Swarthmore, Penn, and elsewhere. One of her friends was Bernie Saffran, the center-right professor at Swarthmore who was my mentor.* Her second husband, Sidney Winter, a highly-regarded academic economist, was also a Swarthmore alum (but more than a decade before Bernie came to teach at Swarthmore).

*It says something that Swarthmore College, of all places, had a center-right econ professor 5 decades ago. Rather unlikely to happen today.

Her daughter, Cathy, went to Swarthmore, and Cathy married a classmate and friend of mine. Both she and her husband are extremely nice.

In fact, one of the shocks that hit me when I went to MIT for graduate school in 1976 was finding economists who were not so nice. Some were downright nasty. Most were highly egotistical. Alice Rivlin and her colleagues were free of those traits.

Through the connection between Alice and Bernie, I got a job as a research assistant at CBO in June 1975, not long after it opened. It was a very rich experience for me. You can read about that in my macro memoir.

She had to overcome adversities of various sorts. Being a female grad student in the mid-1950s. Having a voice that would go uncontrollably from a near-falsetto high pitch to a near-bass low pitch. Having a first husband (Lew) who seemingly went off the rails in late middle age. They were divorced in 1977, and two decades later he was accused of financial fraud.

At Brookings, she was one of the economists involved in the project known as “setting national priorities.” Unfortunately, that project has been discontinued. Back in 2015, I tried unsuccessfully to obtain a grant to undertake a project that was a conscious imitation of that old Brookings project.

Alice Rivlin’s family and friends should be proud of her work and also proud of her as a decent human being.