Paul W. McCracken, Adviser to Presidents, Dies at 96
Source: NYT
Paul W. McCracken, a moderate Republican who served as an economic adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents and who led President Richard M. Nixon’s largely unsuccessful effort to tame the rising inflation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, died on Friday in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 96.
His death was announced by the University of Michigan, where he had taught for most of his career teaching. A wide-ranging thinker, Mr. McCracken was part of a postwar generation of economists who believed that government should play an active role in moderating business cycles, balancing inflation and unemployment, and helping the disadvantaged.
His nearly three years at the White House coincided with a turbulent era marked by rising deficits, rampant inflation, the imposition of wage and price controls, and the breakdown of the system of fixed exchange rates that had governed the world’s currencies since World War II.
As a result, by the early 1980s, Mr. McCracken, like other economists, questioned the Keynesian assumptions that had been dominant since the war. He concluded that high inflation had resulted from “a cumulative paralysis in our will” and called for greater fiscal discipline to limit the growth of government spending — a topic that continues to vex Washington.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/04/us/politics/paul-w-mccracken-adviser-to-presidents-dies-at-96.html
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