Blinder served on President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors (Jan 1993 - June 1994), and as the Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from June 1994 to January 1996. Blinder's recent academic work has focused particularly on monetary policy and central banking , as well as the "offshoring" of jobs, and his writing for lay audiences has been published primarily but not exclusively in New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

Blinder was born in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Syosset High School in Syosset, New York. Blinder received his undergraduate degree in economics from Princeton, graduating summa cum laude in 1967. He subsequently gained an MSc in economics from the London School of Economics (1968) and then received his doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971.

Blinder has been at Princeton since 1971, chairing the economics department from 1988 to 1990. He is a past President of the Eastern Economic Association and Vice President of the American Economic Association. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1991), and a member of the board of the Council on Foreign Relations (since 1997). Blinder's textbook Economics: Principles and Policy, co-written with William Baumol, was first published in 1979, and in 2009 was printed in its eleventh edition.

In 2009 Blinder was inducted into the American Academy of Political and Social Science, "for his distinguished scholarship on fiscal policy, monetary policy and the distribution of income, and for consistently bringing that knowledge to bear on the public arena." He is a strong proponent of free trade.

Blinder has served as the Deputy Assistant Director of the Congressional Budget Office (1975), on President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors (Jan 1993 - June 1994), and as the Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from June 1994 to January 1996. As Vice Chairman he cautioned against raising interest rates too quickly to slow inflation, because of the lags in earlier rises feeding through into the economy. He also warned against ignoring the short term costs in terms of unemployment that inflation-fighting could cause. He was an adviser to Al Gore and John Kerry during their respective presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2004.

Blinder was an early advocate of a "Cash for Clunkers" program, in which the government buys some of the oldest, most-polluting vehicles and scraps them. In July 2008, he wrote an article in The New York Times advocating such a program, which was implemented by the Obama administration during the summer of 2009. Blinder asserted it could stimulate the economy, benefit the environment, and reduce income inequality. The program was both praised for exceeding expectations, and criticized for economic and environmental reasons.

He is married and has two sons.