Boy-Wonder Bosworth

He is not yet 36, looks ten years younger, and would seem quite at home shooting the breeze with some economics professor at a Harvard graduate seminar. That is a serious problem for Barry Bosworth, director of President Carter's Council on Wage and Price Stability (COWPS). Middle-aged business leaders take one look at him and wonder whether he is old enough for even a one-martini lunch. They need not worry. For one thing, Bosworth is a seasoned economist (a year on the staff of Lyndon Johnson's Council of Economic Advisers and six years with the Brookings Institution). More important, he is also the man most responsible for getting the White House moving on anti-inflation policy. The surprising thing is that as director of COWPS since last summer, he has done it from a position of no statutory policymaking power at all.

Ever since it was set up by Gerald Ford in 1974, COWPS has been something of a no-account backwater in the Washington bureaucracy. Its role is limited by law to watching the wage and price activities of industry and the spending programs of Government. When either area shows signs of adding to inflation, COWPS can do little more than send a memo to the White House and hope that someone will read it. Under Bosworth, the council's formal powers remain negligible but the new director has infused COWPS with a sense of urgency it never had before.

Scarcely a week goes by without a new Bosworth inflation alert landing on the President's desk. His memos have attacked the nation's doctors for raising their fees 50% more than the increase in the cost of living last year. He has accused farmers of asking for crop subsidies that might create double-digit food inflation next year. He has criticized Congress--and indirectly even the White House--for appearing to cave in to the farmers' demands. Bosworth has also become an effective jaw-boner. Two weeks ago. he masterminded the Administration's successful effort to prevent the nation's steelmakers from following U.S. Steel in its attempt to raise prices far beyond what would have been justified by the settlement won by striking coal miners. His tactic--phoning U.S. Steel's competitors and persuading them to announce smaller increases--forced U.S. Steel to roll back its own hike. Bosworth's 20 COWPS officials have now begun gathering cost data to give the council a clear picture of just how much prices can be hiked by any major industry without speeding up inflation.

Married and the father of two sons, aged nine and five, Bosworth used to devote himself to hobbies of woodworking and making hand crafted stained glass. He gets little time for those pastimes these days; most often he is seen heading home from his office weighed down with stacks of inflation statistics. He sees voluntary wage-price restraint by unions and management as the only way to check inflation. But he thinks that there is no chance to get that cooperation unless the Government sets a convincing example. Says Bosworth: "If you're going to harangue others to show restraint, you first must show restraint yourself. This Government must first clean its own hands."

That was the burden of a 15-page memo that Bosworth sent around to top Administration officials last month, outlining a number of concrete steps the White House could take to get its own affairs in order. The best evidence of Bosworth's rising influence is that nearly all his suggestions now appear in the Cabinet-level decision paper on anti-inflation policy that is sitting on the President's desk. Says a White House aide: "Within the Administration his talents are well recognized. It's outside that he has problems. The presidents of these big corporations don't want to deal with anybody unless he's at the top of the heap." The President of the United States seems to be an exception.

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