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The economics profession in twentieth-century America began as a humble quest to understand the \"wealth of nations.\" It grew into a profession of immense public prestige--and now suffers a strangely withered public purpose. Michael Bernstein portrays a profession that has ended up repudiating the state that nurtured it, ignoring distributive justice, and disproportionately privileging private desires in the study of economic life. Intellectual introversion has robbed it, he contends, of the very public influence it coveted and cultivated for so long. With wit and irony he examines how a community of experts now identified with uncritical celebration of ''free market'' virtues was itself shaped, dramatically so, by government and collective action. In arresting and provocative detail Bernstein describes economists' fitful efforts to sway a state apparatus where values and goals could seldom remain separate from means and technique, and how their vocation was ultimately humbled by government itself. Replete with novel research findings, his work also analyzes the historical peculiarities that led the profession to a key role in the contemporary backlash against federal initiatives dating from the 1930s to reform the nation's economic and social life. Interestingly enough, scholars have largely overlooked the history that has shaped this profession. An economist by training, Bernstein brings a historian's sensibilities to his narrative, utilizing extensive archival research to reveal unspoken presumptions that, through the agency of economists themselves, have come to mold and define, and sometimes actually deform, public discourse. This book offers important, even troubling insights to readers interested in the modern economic and political history of the United States and perplexed by recent trends in public policy debate. It also complements a growing literature on the history of the social sciences. Sure to have a lasting impact on its field,A Perilous Progressrepresents an extraordinary contribution of gritty empirical research and conceptual boldness, of grand narrative breadth and profound analytical depth.

H. Gardner Ackley, 82, one of the nation's foremost economists and a principal adviser on economic policy to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, died Feb. 12 in Ann Arbor, Mich. He had Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Ackley, who had a long career at the University of Michigan, where he was chairman of the economics department, was called frequently to Washington to provide economic advice. Early in 1969, during Johnson's last month in office, he named Dr. Ackley the U.S. ambassador to Italy, describing him during the announcement as one of his \"most trusted and closest friends.\" Several months after the Nixon administration took office, Dr. Ackley resigned to return to the University of Michigan, from which he retired in 1984.

H. Gardner Ackley, an economics adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and a United States Ambassador to Italy, died in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Feb. 12. Professor Ackley, who retired in 1984 after 43 years as a member of the economics department at the University of Michigan, was 82. Appointed to the President's Council of Economic Advisers by President Kennedy in 1962, Professor Ackley was named chairman of the council in 1964 by President Johnson, serving four years. Although a believer in the Government's ability to manage the economy through fiscal and monetary fine-tuning -- a belief disputed by classical economic theorists -- Professor Ackley did not favor unlimited Government involvement. As chairman of the council, he did not shy away from publicly chastising business and labor for price increases and wage increases exceeding the Government's guidelines, but he said the damage that would be done by the imposition of direct wage and price controls would outweigh that of continued large wage and price increases.

Gavyn Davies (The great rift reopens, 20 February) refers to the Keynesians as \"saltwater\" economists located on the US Atlantic seaboard.

Mr. [Gardner Ackley] gives a failing grade to Say's Law, named for Jean Baptiste Say, an early 19th-century French economist, which asserts that supply creates its own demand. That means that a society's productive activity always generates enough income to absorb the goods produced. Say's Law was the key proposition underlying the ''supply- side'' economics of the big tax cuts championed by President Reagan. The 1981-82 recession, steepest of the postwar period, cast doubt on the validity of Say's Law. The other main element in the Reagan Administration's economic program was ''monetarism,'' based on a law called the Quantity Theory of Money, which asserts that changes in the money supply determine the level of prices. Mr. Ackley calls this Friedman's Law (after Milton Friedman) though he says it could also be called Fisher's Law (after Irving Fisher, 1867-1947) or Hume's Law (after David Hume, 1711-76).

Prof. James Tobin of Yale, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, warned in Congressional testimony this week that the amendment would merely lead to ''cosmetic accounting.'' Prof. Gardner Ackley of the University of Michigan, a recent president of the American Economic Association, said ''the glaring loopholes in the language of the proposed amendment might well prevent it from having any significant effect on Government spending, taxes or deficits.'' This, he added, was hardly a reason for its adoption. ''If anything,'' he said, ''it is a strong reason not to clutter up our Constitution with unwarranted and indefensible economic nonsense.'' Their letter, published in The New York Times of May 5, 1930, warned that employment could not be increased by restricting trade. ''Import controls,'' they said, ''would be an unproductive and irresponsible answer to the problems and needs of industries and workers seeking Government help against foreign competition.''

The half-life of the Johnson administration’s surtax proposal of January 1967 was less than a month. Johnson aide Joe Califano described the congressional response to the president’s initiative: “No one welcomed Johnson’s announcement. Republican opposition had been anticipated, but it hurt when Wilbur Mills and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Russell Long . . . doubted out loud that Congress would pass one.”¹ Privately, Mills told CEA Chairman Ackley that he would not hold hearings on a tax proposal tied to the CEA’s forecast of an economic recovery in the second half of 1967: “You can’t legislate on the basis of

The committee's chairman, Dan Rostenkowski, had told the panelists that they were free to challenge each other. ''We're looking forward to an education,'' the Illinois Democrat said. However, there was no indication in the questions that the members had been converted to the Administration's view that the economy could be stimulated and at the same time inflation would abate. Inflationary Pressure Feared ''The biggest stimulus'' - to savings - ''will be the drop in inflation that follows from tight monetary policy,'' Mr. [John Rutledge] said. As inflation slows, he added, people who have been ''stockpiling commodities'' in anticipation of higher prices will shift their money to financial assets, and ''live off inventories.'' Mr. [Gardner Ackley] branded as ''a fairy tale'' the Administration's forecast that inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index would drop from 11 percent in 1981 to 4.2 percent in 1986. None of the committee's 12 Republicans defended the White House forecast. Theory Is Summarized