Economists and Clinton

James Risen’s “Economists Watch in Quiet Fury” (Jan. 8) misrepresents what I said about Robert Reich. What I said and believe is that:

* Reich is an excellent choice for secretary of labor.

* Whatever disagreement I may have had with his economic diagnoses of 5-10 years ago, his insistence during the last several years on our need for more investment--in people, infrastructure, and business machinery--has been right on target, and he deserves great credit for helping to educate the public about that need.

* My doubts in the past whether he knew what he (quite understandably) didn’t know about macroeconomics were, in the present situation, irrelevant; in any case, he knows the difference between academic speculation in Cambridge and the making of high policy as secretary of labor in Washington.

Risen misunderstands the economic community’s concern--a concern much diminished by the rumored appointments of Alan Blinder and Lawrence Summers--that the new President have available, firsthand, professional macroeconomic expertise of the sort that Walter Heller, James Tobin, Robert Solow and Gardner Ackley, Arthur Okun and Charles Schultze provided Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. And he mixes up what is, in my judgment, the spurious issue of the usefulness of mathematics in economic theorizing with the vital empirical question of whether less than perfectly-competitive real-life markets, left alone, will produce good macroeconomic results, or whether judicious leaning-against-the-wind monetary and, on occasion, fiscal activism can produce better results. That issue has nothing to do with the usefulness of formal models, sensibly interpreted, and careful econometric as well as informal testing of their empirical validity.

FRANCIS M. BATOR

Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political

Economy, Harvard University