To & from Harvard In The Middle of the Road

Three years ago, Harvard Economics Professor James Stembel Duesenberry declined an invitation to join the nation's most influential body of economic consultants, the three-member White House Council of Economic Advisers. He pleaded that he was too busy with a half-finished research project on U.S. capital markets. Last week the invitation came again--and this time Duesenberry accepted. "This isn't the year to say 'let somebody else do it,' " he says. "The problems are not going to be simple."

True enough. Duesenberry, 47, will arrive in Washington at a pivotal time in the council's 19-year history: just when the economy needs more skillful Government management than ever to prolong prosperity without bringing on inflation. The biggest difficulty, Council Chairman Gardner Ackley explained last week in a Manhattan speech, is that "economists simply don't know" enough about how a high-employment economy works to enable them to act "with a high degree of reliability." Adds Duesenberry: "Our problem is to get as much flexibility as we can into 1966 policies, and to avoid any irreversible steps."

Neither Tight nor Easy. That prescription seems to fit Duesenberry's personal inclinations, too. Though he is highly regarded as an authority on monetary policy, Duesenberry insists that he cannot be classified as an advocate of either tight or easy money. His appointment to the $27,000-a-year post, effective Feb. 1, will not change the council's Keynesian flavor. As a council consultant since 1961, he has been among the handful of experts who helped create the framework for the New Economics and work out methods for putting it into operation.

Born in West Virginia, lanky Jim Duesenberry won bachelor's, master's and doctor's degrees (in economics) at the University of Michigan, roomed for a time with former Treasury Under Secretary Robert Roosa. One member of the board that granted Duesenberry's Ph.D. was Gardner Ackley, his new boss. An Air Force statistician during World War II, Duesenberry rose from private to captain. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1946, soon made his mark with a study of consumer spending that helped to spike fears that consumers would spend too little to fuel the postwar economy. He became a full professor in 1957.

Shrewd Choice. In the office next to Duesenberry's customarily cluttered cubicle in Harvard's Littauer Center worked the man he will replace on the CEA: Otto Eckstein, the council's expert on unemployment, steel prices and steel productivity. Eckstein, named to the council in May 1964, must return to Harvard because his original one-year leave, already extended at Lyndon Johnson's request, is expiring.

Duesenberry's academic leave runs until September 1967. His appointment to the CEA, the President's third in a row from the faculty of Harvard or Yale, will leave the council's economic complexion virtually unchanged. Economists across the U.S. seem to agree that the choice was shrewd. "He fits right into the middle of CEA thinking," says Bob Roosa (for whom Duesenberry was a Treasury consultant). "He's a theorist with the quality of judgment." Considering the delicacy of the decisions he will help make, Duesenberry should find plenty of scope for that range of talent.

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