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1984 AEI Economist 1 (1984)

handle is hein.amenin/aeieco1984 and id is 1 raw text is: the economist American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research January 1984 What Economists Do Herbert Stein Recent public attention to the Washington experience of Martin Feldstein, chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, prompts these reminiscences and observations by a former economic adviser to President Nixon. Joys and Travails of a President's Economist On August 16, 1971, the morning after President Nixon startled the world by announcing the imposition of wage and price controls, my son Ben called me and said, Ideo- logically you should fall on your sword, but existentially it's great. I had spent much of my career arguing against wage and price controls, even in World War II. And here I was, economic adviser to the president who imposed the most comprehensive and rigid controls in America's peacetime history. But also I was an active participant in the most exciting event in the record of economic policy. Both the frustration and the exhilaration were present, and I cannot deny that the exhilaration was dominant. Few days in the life of a president's economic adviser are that exciting. Still, the life is well described by frustra- tion at the level of ideology and policy combined with high satisfaction at the level of atmosphere and activity. For me, the satisfaction came largely from the sense of being on the stage-even if as an insignificant extra- where the great figures of history had performed. I worked in an office in an 1870 building where secretaries of state, war, and navy had worked for more than seventy years. When I went from my office in the Executive Office Building to a meeting in the Treasury, my route Herbert Stein is the author of Presidential Economics: The Making of Economic Policy from Hoover to Reagan and Beyond to be published in February 1984 by Simon and Schuster. was through the ground floor of the White House, and I sometimes breasted crowds of wide-eyed tourists on a once-in-a-lifetime trip. One would need a heart of stone not to be thrilled by the feeling of belonging in the house where Lincoln lived. People who themselves go through their lives consciously or unconsciously toeing some conventional party line expect the economic adviser to be a Martin Luther nailing dissenting theses to the White House door. But the White House economist's interpersonal rela- tions are not confined to those greats who are dead and therefore conveniently undemanding and uncompetitive. Most of his relations are with living, breathing people, mainly people within the administration, and his relations with these people largely determine the quality of the adviser's life. These relations in turn depend mainly on the president, even though the adviser does not spend much of his time with the president. The picture of the economic adviser sitting constantly next to the president and whispering in his ear is romance. Economists and the Making of Economic Policy Page 3 The AEI Economist I I

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