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American Economic Association Remembering Joseph A. Pechman, 1918-1989 Author(s): Henry J. Aaron Source: The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 121-124 Published by: American Economic Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1942725 . Accessed: 28/06/2014 17:16 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . American Economic Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Economic Perspectives. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 193.142.30.98 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 17:16:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Remembering Joseph A. Pechman, 1918-1989

American Economic Association

Remembering Joseph A. Pechman, 1918-1989Author(s): Henry J. AaronSource: The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 121-124Published by: American Economic AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1942725 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 17:16

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

American Economic Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheJournal of Economic Perspectives.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 193.142.30.98 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 17:16:19 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Remembering Joseph A. Pechman, 1918-1989

Journal of Economic Perspectives- Volume 4, Number 4-Fall 1990-Pages 121-124

Remembering Joseph A. Pechman, 1918-1989

Henry J. Aaron

n the summer of 1988, economists and others from Washington and around the nation filled the Brookings auditorium to celebrate Joseph Pechman's seventieth birthday and to honor him on his retirement from

the paid Brookings staff. To omit the word "paid" would be wrong. Joe remained professionally active and a fully-participating Brookings senior fellow until he left for home on Friday, August 18th, 1989, less than twenty-four hours before a fatal coronary that struck, with appropriate symbolism as many have noted, immediately after he played and won a set of tennis and was preparing to play a second.

Joe Pechman joined the staff of the Brookings Institution in 1960. The child of poorly educated immigrants, he graduated from the City College of New York in 1937 and the University of Wisconsin in 1942. During World War II, he worked in the war time Office of Price Administration and later served in the U.S. Army. After the war he worked in the Treasury Department, the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers, and the Committee for Economic Devel- opment, a policy oriented organization sponsored by major businesses. Before and after coming to Brookings he taught at M.I.T., Yale, Stanford (twice), Georgetown, Dartmouth, and Williams College. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University.

Joe managed to invert the usual research profile. Most economists publish as much as they can on the way to tenure. Even the best tend to slow down a bit after 50. Joe didn't get that drill quite straight.

Before he was 40, he authored or edited one book and ten scholarly articles, including his classic 1957 article, "Erosion of the Individual Income Tax," which documented how much rates could be reduced if the trend to

* Henry J. Aaron is Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.

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122 Journal of Economic Perspectives

narrow the personal income tax base was reversed. In the next ten years he authored three books and nine articles, including detailed discussions of how to do computer based simulations of the effects of changes in the tax laws on the level and distribution of tax revenues (Pechman, 1965) and the first edition of his landmark treatise, Federal Tax Policy (Pechman, 1966), which untimately went through five editions.

In the succeeding ten years, he added eight books, including his definitive static analysis of the distribution of tax burdens (Pechman and Okner, 1974) and the first of several editions of the Brookings annual review of federal budget policy that he edited, Setting National Priorities (Pechman, 1977), and 24 articles, including his much-cited and reprinted popular essay, "The Rich, the Poor, and the Taxes They Pay" (Pechman, 1969).

Between his sixtieth and seventieth birthdays he continued accelerating, with 19 books and 29 articles spanning macroeconomics and domestic and foreign tax systems. That count excludes all editions except the first of Federal Tax Policy, the fifth edition of which was published two years before his death; dozens of articles in popular magazines; and enough congressional testimony to form yet another good-sized book. In the last year Joe completed his own survey of tax systems of other major industrial countries, Comparative Tax Systems: Europe, Canada, and Japan (Tax Analysts, 1987) and World Tax Reform: A Progress Report (Brookings, 1988). He initiated a series of studies in depth of the tax systems of these countries, authored by experts from these countries, of which he was to be the general editor. He was a full and active partner in the early stages of a study on the distribution of wealth. He was preparing to spend a year teaching graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley and was revising, with characteristic glee, a set of problems designed to make students wrestle with practical issues in tax policy.

He served on the Board of Editors of the American Economic Review. He was elected to membership on the executive committee and later vice-president of the American Economics Association. He was named as a distinguished fellow of the AEA in 1986 and was then elected president, in which capacity he was serving at his death.

Joe had a rare talent for seemingly effortless administration. His eye for talent was extraordinary. His first major administrative act when he took over as Director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution in 1962 was to inform a young Radcliffe Ph.D. named Alice Rivlin that she was not being paid enough. His next was to promote her from research associate to senior fellow. From his position as Director of Economic Studies, he urged the trustees to appoint Kermit Gordon to succeed Robert Calkins as Brookings president. In the course of his directorship he recruited or helped to recruit, to name only a few, Edward M. Denison, Herbert Stein, Arthur Okun, Charles Schultze, Nancy Teeters, Roger Noll, Edward M. Gramlich, and George Perry. He initiated massive research programs in public finance (which he personally managed), regulation of economic activity, and social economics. He was the ringmaster for a weekly Friday lunch that became a Brookings and even a Washington

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Page 4: Remembering Joseph A. Pechman, 1918-1989

Henry J. Aaron 123

w ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. .. ... . .....

Joseph A. Pechman

institution in large measure because Joe created an atmosphere where people disagreed vehemently but not bitterly.

More generally, Joe had a talent, far rarer than that of administrative skill or even of scholarly creativity, of ruthless but rancorless criticism. Even on matters of deepest conviction, like the income tax, he could tell you to your face that you were dead wrong, that he disagreed with you utterly, that you were completely out to lunch-and invite you to lunch. He maintained cordial and affectionate relations with people such as Milton Friedman and James Buchanan, even as they disagreed about fundamental issues of economic policy. I never have seen anyone who so effortlessly fought intellectual battles with intensity but without a trace of meanness or nastiness. Like a professional fighter, he tried as hard as he could for the appointed number of rounds to win

-by decision or knockout-and then put his arm around your shoulders after the final bell.

A lot got done at Brookings during the years when Joe was director. Money certainly helped. A major grant from the Ford Foundation, initiated with an absence of red tape that by today's standards is staggering, led to a small library of books and numerous journal articles, grouped as "Studies in Government Finance." That series, together with Richard Musgrave's path- breaking 1959 treatise, The Theory of Public Finance, helped bring public finance center stage in the economics profession. Subsequent grants from Ford and other foundations underwrote a series of Studies in the Regulation of Economic Activity which helped establish the intellectual foundation for the massive deregulation of the American economy during the 1970s and 1980s, and "Studies on Social Economics," which evaluated the major social experiments, education, social insurance, housing policy, and health care policy. Grants from

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124 Journal of Economic Perspectives

the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation provided part of the support for a new and important journal, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, edited by George Perry and Arthur Okun (and, since Okun's death, by Perry and William Brainard). In addition, the program Joe directed remained actively involved in international and macroeconomics.

But I think the main reason so much got done was that Joe helped make work at Brookings fun. He cared deeply about public policy, and he knew that economists had something useful to say about it. He insisted that scholarly standards could be maintained even if what one wrote contained little math and no jargon and could be understood by an intelligent college graduate. But the mood he fostered was never somber.

The tone is well represented by a story that Joe told about his father. When Joe first went to work for a research organization, his father, who had worked all his life with his hands and had never earned very much, asked Joe to describe the work he did. After his father listened patiently to Joe's description of a work life that bore little similarity to his own, his father commented, "And they pay you for this?"

Few people are vouchsafed the professional triumph of seeing the realiza- tion of what they have worked a lifetime to achieve. Joe devoted his life to the realization of the best possible income tax system. For three decades he wrote books and articles, testified, telephoned, cajoled, and fought to broaden the personal and corporation income tax bases so that rates could be reduced. When Congress and the president finally got together on a tax bill in 1986, Joe had his complaints: marginal tax rates were still too low, income averaging was mistakenly repealed, capital gains held until death still escaped tax entirely, and the tax law did not treat two-earner couples fairly. Despite these and some other shortcomings, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 is a memorial to Joe's lifetime of hard and joyous work.

References

Pechman, Joseph A., "Erosion of the Indi- vidual Income Tax," National Tax Journal, March 1957, X, 1-25.

Pechman, Joseph A., "The Use of Elec- tronic Computers in Revenue Estimating," Government Finance and Economic Development, OECD, 1965.

Pechman, Joseph A., Federal Tax Policy. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1966.

Pechman, Joseph A., "The Rich, the Poor, and the Taxes They Pay," The Public Interest, Fall 1969, 17, 21-43. (Brookings Institution reprint #168.)

Pechman, Joseph A., ed., Setting National

Priorities: The 1978 Budget. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1977.

Pechman, Joseph A., Federal Tax Policy. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1966; fifth edition, 1987.

Pechman, Joseph A., ed., Comparative Tax Systems: Europe, Canada, and Japan. Arlington: Tax Analysts, 1987.

Pechman, Joseph A., World Tax Reform: A Progress Report. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1988.

Pechman, Joseph A., and Benjamin Okner, Who Bears the Tax Burden? Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1974.

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