ADVISING THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES ON ECONOMIC POLICY

Editors’ note: This essay recalls some of the ways in which government policymakers come to agreement on how to solve economic problems and formulate economic policy proposals for submission to the President of the United States. These posthumously edited reflections were excerpted from Paul MacAvoy's unpublished manuscript, Day to Day at the CEA: Letters, Memoranda, and Notes on Economic Policy to the World at Large from a Member of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Ford Administration (1975-1976), available in its entirety on the Social Science Research Network. The editors have reordered some paragraphs to facilitate the essay's flow, taking into consideration that the reader is not seeing the nearly 300 pages of original source documents within which Professor MacAvoy interspersed the commentary published here. The editors have also given the essay a title and section captions.