John Miller on the U.S. Economy, Student Research and Cycling in Italy (2002)
What's new?
John Miller I have a new baby, Sam, who is seven months old.
What are you working on these days?
John Miller I just published an article in Dollars and Sense--it's a popular magazine I write for. My piece is about the vanishing [federal] surplus since Sept. 11. Just a year ago, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the federal government would rack up $5.6 trillion in surpluses over the next decade.
We now know that the federal budget will run a deficit over the next several years and use monies out of the Social Security surplus for the entire decade.
The shrinking surplus is related to Sept. 11, the recession, increased military spending and the Bush tax cut. But the largest place the surplus went is to the tax cut--not Sept. 11--and from this point out that tax cut goes almost exclusively to the top. Something like over 80 percent of the remainder tax cut goes to the richest 20 percent of the population.
Politics are obviously important to your work. How do you address that in the classroom?
John Miller Well, I teach some courses that are about the political process. I teach a course called Public Finance, which is about the role of government in the economy. And I teach traditional economics in that course as well as alternative visions of the roles of government in the economy. And we look at how the economy works and what the public sector ought to do about promoting economic equality--I offer readings that are from all political perspectives.
For instance, on what role the government should play in the economy, we read Milton Friedman (pictured at left). We also read Richard Musgrave, who is a traditional, 1970s, Brookings Institute, old-fashioned, dusty, Keynesian kind of guy who used to say, "Oh, we live in a mixed economy. Wherever the market fails, the government should intervene." And he believed in progressive taxation based on a person's ability to pay--with the understanding that the ones who make the most are the ones who get the most out of the system and are in the best position to contribute. So, what we consider a liberal position today used to be what public finance economists [all] used to say.
We also read some stuff by Fred Block, the economic sociologist. Fred Block wrote a book called The Vampire State, which challenges the conservative portrait of the public sector as a blood-sucker that does nothing good other than to steal the people's money. So we compare those kinds of ideas, and we talk about tax reform and what good tax reform would be. And we read Bush tax documents and campaign literature and criticize them.
We also look at the question of Social Security, and the environment as it relates to the economy, so that's the range of debate. The way I deal with politics is as a market model. I try to present different alternatives and have the students figure out how each argument works. I'm not in the business of getting them to agree with me. I am in the business of getting them to respect my argument. I want them to make informed choices, so I ask them to write papers that evaluate different perspectives on economic issues.
Is it fair to call you a liberal economist?
John Miller I'm to the left of that. For a decade I was on the steering committee of the Union for Radical Political Economics. Some of the public stuff I've been doing is with a Washington-based group that works to put alternative voices into the media, and it's called the Institute for Public Accuracy. They distribute press releases with quotes on a given subject; I've worked with them. I also do a lot of radio interviews and some television for United for a Fair Economy. I did a New Hampshire NPR [National Public Radio] interview in September [2001]. That was a hard interview--just a week after Sept. 11.
I said that we should be bailing out workers as well as corporations. We should be concerned about stewardesses and pilots in the airline industry, not just the owners. And if we say that the airline industry shouldn't be penalized because of a national emergency, then surely no worker should lose his job because of a national emergency--and if that requires the public sector to be the employer of last resort, then that's what the public sector ought to do.
What's your take on the administration's handling of the Enron scandal?
John Miller The lack of reliabilty of accounting standards is really a problem. A lot of people lost their money and executives got out using what appears to be information not available to others. Certainly, someone will look into whether there are inside trading violations. And it seems that part of what they set up went wrong through perfectly legal practices, so it becomes a question of how much of went wrong is just business as usual for large business. We need to look systemically at how this happened. The large accounting firms are both outside auditors and consultants that do the inside audits--so with Arthur Andersen doing both for Enron, the idea of checks and balances was simply a system of checks. I don't know a lot about it. But I've been really floored by much of what I've heard.
The magazine I write for is doing a piece on Enron called, "Lying on Top." [Dollars and Sense is available online at http://www.dollarsandsense.org . The Cambridge, Mass.-based magazine also publishes Real World Macro: Macroeconomics Reader,now in its 18th edition; John Miller is a co-editor.]
What's the fashion in economic circles these days?
John Miller It used to be the Keynesians. They're kind of old, post-war guys who thought the government could intervene in the economy and make things better, which was John Maynard Keynes' solution to the Great Depression and those were the sort of liberal leanings of economists of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Their position has declined in recent decades and they're seen as dinosaurs.
Now, highly mathematical, technical stuff that is about the virtue of market transactions is popular. I think most macroeconomists describe themselves as New-Classical economists. They write articles about how markets are basically self-regulating and little government intervention is needed to keep the economy going.
You've written a lot that's been published in (relatively) mainstream media. Was that by design?
John Miller I think writing popular economics is really important. It's important to present points of view that don't frequently get heard, and it's important to write about economic issues in an accessible way. I'm proud to be part of that effort.
You regularly work with students. Tell about one who impressed you a lot.
John Miller James Jarrett, who graduated last year [2001], did an honors thesis project on AIDS in Uganda under his own initiative. He had teamed up with a family friend who was doing a documentary on AIDS. At the last minute, she went to Thailand instead and so James applied and got a Davis International Fellowship [from Wheaton]. He went in January and did incredibly sophisticated work for an undergraduate. He talked to government officials, gathered data on numbers of cases by district, talked to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and went to talk with workers in villages. He came back and completed an independent study project with [econ professor] Brenda Wyss. He built that research into his senior thesis. He did some statistical work looking at effects of poverty efforts, economic growth an NGO presence on the length of time that HIV-infected Ugandans lived. He was able to show that not only economic growth was important for lowering the incidence of AIDS and for lengthening the life span of Ugandans with HIV. He also found that NGO presence made a real difference in the lifespan of infected people. It's incredibly difficult to get that kind of information. It was thoughtful and sophisticated research.
What do you do for fun?
John Miller We went cycling in Tuscany [before the birth of baby Samuel in summer 2001]. It was only about 40 miles per day. We went from the Etruscan Coast [near Alba] to Sienna, near the hills inland. It was just beautiful--but it was uphill. I got my partner Ellen to come with me because it was riding and cooking. We had great food and we'd just ride up these hills in Tuscany. To descend, you really needed some skill to get around the switchbacks. Ellen and I are good cyclists by intermediate standards, but the people we were with were really good. It was just beautiful. You would just glide. Then we went a little further inland to Chianti country. The last day, we went from Voltera back to the coast. It was like pedaling through a painting.
Anything closer to home?
John Miller We also work with a group called Bikes Not Bombs that's based in Roxbury on the Jamaica Plain line. They refurbish bikes for inner-city youth who learn how to take care of the bike, and they can earn a bike. So the group does a lot of youth work. And donated bikes also get cleaned up and they ship them to Nicaragua. Ellen and I work on their fund-raisers. We also have led a couple of their summer rides; we led one from Jamaica Plain to Walden Pond.
What were the circumstances of your first visit to Wheaton?
John Miller I needed a job. I had job offers from Wheaton and the University of Minnesota-Duluth on the same day. Wheaton called me the day after my interview, so I figured they liked me. And I liked the school a lot. I talked to John Walgreen [from the economics department] on the phone. He has a thick Boston accent--and I kept thinking, "This is like talking to JFK." [Miller grew up in Pittsburgh.] Then, on the morning of my interview, three students took me to breakfast at Emerson Hall without the faculty. I thought that the students were really impressive.
How would you characterize Wheaton's economics faculty?
John Miller I think teaching economics is hard, and we have a very good teaching department. They make economics accessible and interesting and try to convey the charm of our discipline. It's not something that many people can do well--and it's not something that anyone can do well without putting in a great deal of work. Our department has people who get really outstanding results in the classroom.
For more on John Miller, go to http://www.wheatoncollege.edu/Faculty/JohnMiller.html.