West Coast Economists Forge Axis With D.C. : Academia: No university outside the prestigious Ivy League has served up so much economic brainpower to a White House as UC Berkeley.

Richard Gilbert was at the airport, headed home to California from his job at the Justice Department, when he let it slip: He was an “economist” from UC Berkeley.

Instantly, a nearby traveler--who hadn’t quite heard him right--piped in cheerfully, “I’m from Berkeley, and I’m a communist, too!”

In fact, Gilbert is a card-carrying member of a very different cadre, one now playing an extraordinary role in the Clinton Administration. Janet Yellen’s confirmation a week ago as a member of the Federal Reserve Board made her the ninth Berkeley economist to land a Washington job during Clinton’s tenure.

For a school widely remembered as the radical birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, the Washington connection is a different sort of first: No college outside the prestigious Ivy League, it appears, has ever served up so much economic brainpower to a White House.

“The problem is these guys can’t commute, so I can’t get the courses taught,” laments John M. Quigley, chairman of Berkeley’s 33-person economics department, who takes obvious pride in the dilemma.

Yellen’s appointment makes her the second Berkeleyite at top policy levels, along with Laura D’Andrea Tyson, who runs the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Other Berkeley professors toil in the trenches--at the Treasury Department, on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers and at the Federal Communications Commission, where they analyze issues ranging from health care to cable television rules to the information superhighway.

It is not yet clear if the Berkeley gang will leave a legacy, particularly in an Administration that has back-pedaled from its initial let’s-tinker-with-it strategy for the economy.

Still, their presence offers a peek into the exclusive world where economic policy is forged. And the eclectic roster from Berkeley--which has no single, over-arching economic philosophy--reveals much about Clinton’s own view of the world.

The White House was drawn to economists who generally have specialized in questions of regulation, trade, labor and industry, rather than the big, “macro” picture alone.

Such specialties are “consistent with the philosophy of an activist Democratic president,” observes William T. Dickens, whose own interests include labor and welfare.

“Obviously,” added Dickens--who left Berkeley to work for Tyson on the staff of the White House council--”there were hardly any Berkeley people in the previous two Republican administrations.”

While its ideology may be hard to peg, Berkeley’s stature in economics is not. Its department is counted among the top in the nation.

* Yellen, who teaches at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business along with three of the others, now holds one of seven governors’ seats on the Federal Reserve. While the Fed is independent from the White House, she is a Clinton appointee and is expected to be more sensitive to job creation and the danger of rising interest rates than some of her Fed colleagues.

* Bradford De Long, who was recruited into the Administration before actually starting a new job at Berkeley, has provided analysis on trade accords and monitored the economy and other issues at the Treasury Department.

* Gilbert provides economic analysis in the Justice Department’s antitrust division, where he is working on a policy for intellectual property--questions, for instance, about the sort of licensing requirements appropriate in an age of exploding electronic information.

(Gilbert’s fellow traveling “communist,” by the way, was kidding--just an engineering professor with a sense of humor.)

* Tyson, who chairs the White House council, advises the president on the state of the economy and often speaks for the White House on economic issues.

“A lot of what we do would fit just as well in a Republican administration as in a Democratic administration,” maintains Michael L. Katz, chief economist at the independent Federal Communications Commission, where he works on regulation of cable rates and other communications issues.

The California economists also contribute to a certain West Coast sensibility within the Administration. The Berkeleyites, for example, have been known to bemoan the quality of Washington coffee and speak wistfully about Bay Area weather during the past icy winter.

“Have I seen anybody wearing Birkenstocks with their suit?” asks De Long, referring to the sandals popularized by liberal activists in an earlier day. “Only once.”

To be sure, West-Coast wonks have had their chances to influence economic policy before. Michael J. Boskin of Stanford University served as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Bush. Boskin’s Stanford colleague, John Taylor, was also on the Bush council. Currently, Stanford’s Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Tyson recruit, is a member of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Yet is is also true that logistical realities have always favored would-be-policy-makers who live in the East, particularly those from prestigious Ivy League schools.

Northeastern professors can hop on an airplane, “testify before Congress and be home in time for dinner,” notes Berkeley’s Quigley, who formerly taught at Yale.

All three of Clinton’s choices to serve on the White House economic council, including Tyson, taught at Princeton in the 1970s, for example--and all three earned their doctoral degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

With little fanfare, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government sent more than eight scholars to the Administration, including Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich, although just a few are economists.

But if Berkeley’s role is something new, the emerging California-Washington axis is a natural alternative to the Northeast corridor, mirroring a westward flow of wealth and population that has been occurring for decades.

Robert M. Solow, a Nobel laureate economist at MIT, jokes that the Berkeley crowd illustrates what a colleague of his once described as the difference between “saltwater” and “freshwater” economists.

“Saltwater economists”--more tolerant of a government role to achieve social goals--are often found in coastal schools, goes the tale. Not surprisingly, the names Harvard and MIT pop up repeatedly on the resumes of the Berkeley group.

“Freshwater” economists, by contrast--more devoted to the free-market, laissez faire views identified with the University of Chicago--often are found between the coasts.

Certainly, talk of a Berkeley “mafia” would be premature, despite the school’s expanding network. “There’s lots of collaboration,” making it hard to isolate the contributions from Berkeley or any other one school, observes Lawrence Katz, chief economist at the Labor Department and a former Berkeley teacher himself.

Moreover, non-Berkeleyites at the White House, National Economic Council and Treasury Department all are entrenched, powerful players in economic policy.

“Just because they’re in Washington doesn’t mean a lot,” Sherwin Rosen, chairman of the University of Chicago’s economics department, said of the Berkeley group. “It depends on what they’re going to do.”

Still, the chance to apply ivory tower ideas to the real world is a chance that many scholars only dream of. Berkeley’s large numerical presence is, in a sense, the ultimate network, expanding the faculty’s reach into “the political, congressional and federal agency sphere,” as MIT’s Solow puts it.

And if a trip on the Berkeley-Washington corridor will never be as simple as a hop on the Washington-Boston shuttle, the Berkeleyites are getting better at it all the time. A couple even have taken turns planning the ground transportation on their cross-country commutes.

“I think we definitely have a record for the longest car pool,” Gilbert said.