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Raburn "Mac" Williams
Professor Emeritus, UH-Manoa Economics, 1969 - 1995
My journey to Hawaii began on a cold, blustery day in January 1969. At the time, I was writing my dissertation at the University of Chicago, aided by a generous research fellowship at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and looking for a job. One of my interviews at the American Economic Association meetings was with Burnie Campbell, and his enthusiasm for Hawaii enchanted me. Six months later I arrived on the shores of Oahu to accept an assistant professorship, not in the Economics Department, but in the Department of Business Economics and Quantitative Methods in the College of Business Administration. Although I had no intention of remaining more than a few years in Hawaii, it was love at first sight.
Despite my base in the College of Business, many of my closest friends and compatriots were in the Economics Department. Among those who came to Hawaii the same year were Gary Walton, Robert Heller, Jim Moncur, Jim Roumasett, Jim Mak, and Bob Ebel. Thanks to these connections I was asked to serve on numerous dissertation committees, especially those involving monetary economics, and became a friend and counselor to many of the econ grad students. Two of them come vividly to mind. Won-Key Kwon was an extremely promising scholar who wrote a theoretical dissertation on international monetary theory. He would have gone on to have a stellar career had he not been tragically killed in the crash of an airliner in 1980. The other was Girol Karacaoglu whose dissertation was an extremely sophisticated empirical estimation of a monetarist model of the United States economy. (Ed.: Girol became Chief Economist of the National Bank of New Zealand and is currently CEO of PSIS, New Zealand's largest family banking cooperative, i.e., credit union).
 To my delight, two of my mentors came to the Economics Department as visiting professors. Edward Shaw, who had been my undergraduate advisor at Stanford University and the man most responsible for my choice of economics as a career, spent the spring of 1970 in Hawaii. Then Milton Friedman, who had been my dissertation chairman at the University of Chicago, spent the spring semester of 1972 in the Economics Department. Despite his age, Milton consistently beat me in numerous games of tennis that spring. Milton, an unofficial economic advisor to Nixon in the early days of his administration, had become extremely disillusioned and disappointed with the president. In August 1971, Nixon had imposed wage and price controls on the economy. Wage and price controls were anathema to Milton's free market principles, and he felt personally betrayed. During Milton's semester in Hawaii, he taught an experimental undergraduate course entitled Government Price Controls, which I attended. The course was divided into three separate sections: specific price controls - such as floors on agricultural prices and ceilings on rents, general price controls - such as those imposed by President Nixon the year before, and the fixing of foreign exchange rates. The course developed all the aspects of a principles of economics course - microeconomics, macroeconomics, and international finance - all in the context of price controls. It was an extraordinary course, and it is a shame that those lectures were not video recorded.
In the College of Business, I taught courses on Managerial Economics and Business Conditions Analysis, but my research interest was monetary economics. The late 1960s were truly revolutionary times in macroeconomics: the naive Keynesian models of the early post-war period were giving way to new monetarist models of aggregate demand; the traditional Phillips Curve was becoming unstable and would soon be replaced by the concept of an accelerationist Phillips Curve; and the Fisher effect of inflationary expectations on nominal rates of interest was rediscovered. Roger Miller, who had been a fellow graduate student at the University of Chicago, and I attempted to fill a void in existing macroeconomic texts by introducing these new ideas in a supplementary undergraduate text entitled The Economics of National Issues (1972). Roger and I followed that book with a graduate level treatment of these concepts in Inflation and Unemployment: The New Economics of the Wage-Price Spiral (1974). "The Fisher Relationship Under Different Monetary Standards," Journal of Money Credit and Banking (1978), written with Ibrahim Ibrahim, a colleague in the College of Business Administration, compared the formation of inflationary expectations as revealed by the Fisher effect on nominal rates of interest under two monetary regimes: the gold standard and the post-World War II period. I had previously addressed some of the problems with Keynesian approaches to fiscal policy in "A Note on the Effects of a Reduction in Personal Income Tax Rates," Public Finance (1977).
In 1980 I joined the Economics Department and began a collaboration with Maxwell Fry that resulted in a textbook, American Money and Banking (1984). During the late 1980s one of my projects was developing a course under the rubric "Monetary Theory and Policy." About one-third of the course developed the foundations of monetary theory and macroeconomics, the remaining two-thirds of the course used that theoretical framework to analyze twentieth-century American monetary policy. Those lectures evolved into a macroeconomic history, The Politics of Boom and Bust in Twentieth Century America: A Macroeconomic History (1994).
In 1995, I retired from the University of Hawaii. What was to be a short stint in Hawaii turned out to be a 26-year odyssey. Although I am no longer a resident of Hawaii, my love for the aina will remain with me always.
Raburn Williams
Seattle, Washington
March 2006
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