Wilson Fields Conservative Economic Team : Governor: Members of advisory panel headed by George P. Shultz devised policies for Presidents Nixon, Bush and Reagan.

Gov. Pete Wilson on Tuesday named an all-star team of conservative intellectuals to his newly formed Council of Economic Advisers, including two Nobel Prize winners and four people who teach at Stanford University or are fellows at its free-market-oriented think tank, the Hoover Institution.

The council, headed by former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, also includes the chairmen of two of California’s biggest corporations--BankAmerica and Southern California Edison.

The panel, many of whose members helped devise the economic policies of Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush, will advise the Republican governor on the budget, taxes and other policies that Wilson said are critical to the future of the state’s economy.

“They are possessed of the experience, the knowledge, the expertise to give the best possible advice,” Wilson said. He said the group would add an intellectually exciting range of opinion to the advice he customarily receives from his own staff.

But Democratic Assemblyman John Vasconcellos of Santa Clara, the longtime chairman of the Assembly’s budget committee, said the group represented a disappointingly narrow spectrum of economic ideas.

“It’s one school of intellectual thought, which has been largely discredited by the failure of the last two (federal) Administrations,” Vasconcellos said. “It’s kind of the Reagan-Bush group that bankrupted the country being recycled. It leaves a lot to be desired.”

Many of the members of Wilson’s team, in fact, mirror his view that in government and taxes, less is better.

Included among the panel’s 16 members are Nobel Prize-winning economists Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, and Michael J. Boskin, who was chairman of former President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Also on the list are management guru Peter F. Drucker; BankAmerica Chairman Richard Rosenberg; Edison Chairman John E. Bryson; James A. Thomson, president of the Rand Corp., and John A. Gunn, president of Dodge & Cox, an investment management firm.

Others are Hoover Institution fellow Martin Anderson, UC San Diego professor George Borjas, Stanford professor Lawrence J. Lau, UCLA professors Alfred E. Osborne and James Q. Wilson, and Lynn Reaser, chief economist for First Interstate Bank.

The members, who are unpaid and will meet with Wilson in private, are expected to examine, among other issues, the relative merit of repealing a half-cent portion of the sales tax scheduled to expire in June or exempting purchases of manufacturing equipment from the sales tax.

Wilson said he also will ask the council to examine the effect of federal trade and regulatory policies on California’s economy and to tell him how the nationwide shortage of credit is hampering economic growth in the state.

Wilson’s formal search for outside economic counsel breaks with a tradition among California governors, who have relied on economists at the state Finance Department and, for Wilson, the Office of Planning and Research. Those staff members will still be Wilson’s first source of nuts-and-bolts information on the economy and fiscal policy, while the volunteer council of advisers is intended to serve as a sounding board for new ideas and the general direction of state policy.

The governor’s move comes at a time when Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown of San Francisco is about to hold an economic summit in Los Angeles in an effort to solicit ideas from those outside government about how best to right the California economy. The governor and three of his panel members--Rosenberg, Bryson and Reaser--will be speaking on the first day of the two-day session next week.

Shultz, who helped Wilson choose the council’s members, said the council will meet three or four times a year.

He predicted that the sessions “are going to be a riot” as members exchange theories and viewpoints and offer the governor their unvarnished advice.

Of the council’s 16 members, 10 either graduated from Stanford, teach at the university or are fellows of the conservative Hoover Institution. Several also have been associated with the conservative University of Chicago School of Economics. Shultz, a Hoover fellow who served in the Nixon and Reagan cabinets, acknowledged that no effort was made to get a mixture of ideologies, but he said the group was by no means single-minded.

“If you’re looking for a consensus, you’re probably not going to get it,” Shultz said, calling the group a “mixture of idea people and people who have been in the world.”

Although the council includes such figures as Boskin, who was a chief architect of the federal economic policy that has been blamed for Bush’s downfall, others, such as Friedman, have strayed from the mainstream. Shultz has broken with most political theorists and practitioners by advocating the legalization of drugs.

Wilson said he would welcome whatever argument and advice the group has to offer. The state’s economy peaked in 1990 and has lost 800,000 jobs since, resulting in stagnant tax receipts and recurring budget shortfalls throughout Wilson’s term.

“I’m looking for the experience and thinking of some of the best minds in the state,” he said.