‘Taking the Raw Edges Off Capitalism’

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Dan Mitchell, UCLA Luskin professor emeritus of public policy, wrote an essay for Zocalo Public Square about efforts in 1930s California to build a social safety net for older Americans, with lessons for today’s debates on aging and “entitlements.” The campaigns, which predated the launch of Social Security, included the Townsend Plan, which called for the federal government to give $200 a month to every American over 60, and the Ham and Eggs initiative, which called on the state of California to give $30 to adults over 50 every Thursday. While these efforts failed, their larger ideas would triumph. “Social Security was not inspired by the Townsend Plan, but it was part of the New Deal’s larger idea of taking the raw edges off capitalism through government intervention,” Mitchell wrote. Advocates for the aging population remained a force in California politics for years, fighting battles that foreshadowed today’s struggle over how to divide the economic pie between younger and older generations.

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Mitchell on the Impact of Coronavirus on California’s Economy

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Daniel J.B. Mitchell, professor emeritus of public policy and management, spoke with the San Francisco Chronicle about COVID-19’s impact on the California economy. In January, Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a budget proposal that projected a multibillion-dollar surplus and new programs for housing, health care and wildfire prevention. A revised 2020-21 spending plan, due in May, will need to account for the widespread shutdown of the state’s economy due to concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus. The economy has already suffered a “tremendous shock,” Mitchell said, and the period of rebuilding could last years. “If you create enough disruption, it’s not so easy to go back,” he said. “So you could be looking at a very prolonged period here in California where the underlying economy is not good.”

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Daniel J.B. Mitchell

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Daniel J.B. Mitchell is Ho-su Wu professor at the Anderson Graduate School of Management and the School of Public Affairs, U.C.L.A. Within the latter school, he chaired the Department of Policy Studies during 1996-97. Prof. Mitchell was formerly director of the U.C.L.A. Institute of Industrial Relations (1979-90) and continues to serve on the Institute’s advisory committee.

During Phase II of the federal wage/price controls program of the early 1970s, Prof. Mitchell was chief economist of the Pay Board, the agency that administered wage controls. He was twice associated with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., including a stint as a senior fellow in the economic studies program (1978-79), and participated in several Brookings-sponsored research projects. Professional activities have included memberships on the Executive Boards of the Industrial Relations Research Association (both national and Southern California), the North American Economics and Finance Association, and the Institute of Industrial Relations Association. Prof. Mitchell is the immediate past president of the North American Economics and Finance Association. He has also served on the nominating committee of the American Economic Association and on the editorial boards of various academic journals. He is editor of a book series on workplace studies published by M.E. Sharpe, Inc. and began a term as co-editor of the journal Industrial Relations in 1997.

Prof. Mitchell regularly served as a member of the Human Resource Forecast Panel while it operated at the Conference Board and later at U.C.L.A. He is a member of the International Industrial Relations Association and chairs one of its study groups (Pay Systems). At UCLA, he was co-director and then director (1999-2000) of the UCLA Anderson Business Forecasting Project. As a faculty member at UCLA, he has created a course on “California Policy Issues” (now co-taught with former presidential candidate and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis), now a core course of the minor in Public Affairs. Prof. Mitchell has served as a consultant to the Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Reserve Board, the President’s Council on Wage and Price Stability, the U.S. Department of Labor, and the International Labour Organisation. His publications have generally been in the areas of wage determination, wage-price controls, concession bargaining, flexible pay plans, non-wage employee benefits, use of labor-market data, labor standards in international trade, and other aspects of labor-market analysis. Prof. Mitchell is the author of Pensions, Politics, and the Elderly: Historic Social Movements and Their Lessons for Our Aging Society (M.E. Sharpe, 2000).

The book uses California’s colorful experience with “pensionite” movements of the state’s seniors during the period from the 1920s through the 1940s to draw implications for the upcoming retirement of the baby boom. Prof. Mitchell has two children and resides in Santa Monica, California with his wife Alice.

SELECTED BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

“Pensions, Politics, and the Elderly”
ME Sharpe, 2000