Ezekiel, Mordecai

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EZEKIEL, MORDECAI

Mordecai Joseph Brill Ezekiel (May 10, 1899–October 31, 1974) was economic adviser to Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace from 1933 to 1944. Ezekiel helped draft the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and other New Deal farm legislation, and he was an active participant in the debates of the 1930s over planning, fiscal policies, and recovery strategies.

Ezekiel earned his doctorate from the Brookings Institution in 1927 while working for the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Agricultural Economics. During the 1920s, he gained an international reputation for his brilliant applications of statistics to economic analysis. In 1930 Ezekiel took a position as assistant chief economist for the Federal Farm Board, and the experience of the Farm Board's ill-fated attempts to stabilize cotton and wheat prices convinced him that farmers needed a bolder form of government intervention to rescue them from the price collapse of the Great Depression. Consequently, he collaborated with the economist M. L. Wilson of Montana State College to propose a government-backed system of emergency production controls and benefit payments known as the Voluntary Domestic Allotment Plan. Major elements of their proposal were incorporated in the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), Ezekiel argued, might assist farmers in the Depression crisis, but it could not restore farm prosperity because of agriculture's dependence on urban and industrial demand and on international trade. Consequently, he argued throughout the 1930s that agricultural recovery demanded reducing tariffs and trade barriers and creating systems of economic planning to achieve full employment. Ezekiel criticized the National Recovery Administration and other New Deal measures for embracing economic restriction in place of a broad-based recovery strategy. He proposed instead a program of "industrial expansion" that he popularized in two books, $2,500 a Year: From Scarcity to Abundance (1936) and Jobs for All through Industrial Expansion (1939). Building in part on the "administered price" thesis developed by the economist Gardiner Means, Ezekiel argued for a cooperative planning system that would use tax incentives and production quotas to initiate an expansion of the non-farm economy. He also joined with the socalled spenders in the New Deal to advocate Keynesian policies of fiscal expansion to counter the recession of 1937 to 1938.

Ezekiel's advocacy of economic planning and his status as one of the New Deal's highest ranking and most visible Jewish figures made him a favorite target of New Deal critics. Anti-Semitic diatribes often warned of his influence in the "Jew Deal." But although he was a respected economist, his planning proposals never gained a serious hearing from Franklin Roosevelt, and among economists Ezekiel's proposals were far less influential than the fiscal policies advocated by the economist Alvin Hansen.

During World War II, Ezekiel worked briefly with the War Production Board and also helped organize the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). He joined the FAO staff in 1946 after being forced to resign from the Department of Agriculture under pressure from conservative congressmen. Ezekiel stayed with the FAO until 1961 and worked to develop its economic research division and its policies for economic development.