STEIN, HERBERT

STEIN, HERBERT (1916–1999), U.S. economist. Stein was born in Detroit, Michigan. After graduating from Williams College in 1935, he obtained his doctorate from the University of Chicago. For 22 years he was on the staff of the Committee for Economic Development (known as CED), an influential, privately sponsored research and policy-formulating organization. Subsequently, he joined the Brookings Institution and was appointed to the President's Council of Economic Advisers by President Nixon soon after his election (1969–71). In 1972, Stein became the Council's chairman, serving until 1974, after which he taught at the University of Virginia. He was appointed a member of the Advisory Committee of National Growth Policy Processes in 1976 and adjutant scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, and scholar in 1977. Stein, who had long opposed government intervention in private price and wage decisions, played a major role in the first attempt by a peacetime administration to enforce price and wage controls, although he was not optimistic about the program's success. Stein is credited with developing the concept of the "full employment budget" during the 1940s. This concept establishes government expenditures on the basis not of actually expected government income, but of income that would be received in a fully prosperous economy. Along the same lines is the view, represented in the early post-World War II years by the CED, that budgetary deficits are not always bad. Stein was a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the A. Willis Robertson Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Virginia. In 2000 the National Association for Business Economics created the Herbert Stein Public Service Award, which is presented to a policy adviser or policymaker in the U.S. or abroad with an outstanding record of public service. The first award was presented to Stein posthumously in September 2000.   Stein's publications include The Fiscal Revolution in America (1969), the novel On the Brink (with B. Stein, 1977), Moneypower (with B. Stein, 1979), Presidential Economics (1984), Washington Bedtime Stories (1986), The New Illustrated Guide to the American Economy (with M. Foss, 1995), On the Other Hand (1995), and What I Think (1998). His son Ben Stein is a noted writer, scholar, and humorist. (Joachim O. Ronall / Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)