Ed Clarke is currently a Senior Economist with the Offi ce of Management and Budget, (Offi ce of Information and Regulatory Affairs) involved in transportation regulatory affairs. He is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he received a MBA and a PhD (1978). He has worked in public policy at the city/regional (Chicago), State, Federal and international levels. Ed has been a Federal government economist for 27 years.
As relates to his expertise in transportation economics and policy, he served as a urban economic analyst with the Real Estate Research Corportation of Chicago and the State of Illinois Bureau of the Budget (as economic advisor to the Director). In both of these jobs he was involved in various aspects of transportation fi nance and planning. He has served as special assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury (George P. Shultz) and chief economist at A. I. D's Bureau of Planning and Policy Coordination. During the mid-1970's, he was heavily involved in airline and trucking deregulation and most recently in oversight of Federal regulatory activities affecting transportation.
Optional: In public economics, he developed the demand revealing mechanism for public project selection which was noted in the Nobel Committee's award of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Economics to William Vickrey. Clarke's 1995 TRB paper (with Brough and Tideman) , entitled "Airport Congestion and Noise, Interplay of Allocation and Distribution" illustrates the potential applicability of the Vickrey and Clarke/Groves demand revealing mechanisms to problems of transportation congestion.
Overview of Demand Revealing Processes
The demand revealing process has been called "a new and superior process for making social choices," a process that holds some promise of "creating an intellectual revolution in economics and politics".
The demand revealing process has been called "a new and superior process for making social choices," a process that holds some promise of "creating an intellectual revolution in economics and politics". It relies on a so-called "Clarke tax" or "pivot mechanism" to ensure that individuals/groups will adequately consider the social cost of their influence on social outcomes, thereby ensuring truthful revelation of preferences and overcoming the "free rider" problem of public goods provisioning. This book outlines Clarke's approach to the use of demand revelation in the creation of "demand revealing markets" accompanied by the improved management of social entitlements to public goods and services. Based on these refinements, he shows ways of achieving improved government performance relating to taxation, spending and government regulatory management.
These mechanisms were highlighted in the award of the 1996 Nobel Prize. The Nobel Committee based the award to William Vickrey, in part based on his development of the "second price auction" as a "truth telling, incentive compatible mechanism. The auction "underlies the so-called Clarke-Groves mechanism for eliciting truthful tenders for public projects."
Supplementary
Borrowed/updated from an application to a Training Program - circa 1995
I have had more than thirty years of experience in and with government to develop a sounder domestic and international political economy. My practical experience includes that of planner/economist working with the City of Chicago's designated planning fi rm (1967-70) to make that city a dominant international trade and financial center; the State of Illinois (1970-73) to help reform its tax, expenditure and economic development policies (particularly in the area of educational finance); and the Federal Government (1973-92) to better determine how the governmental regulatory apparatus (inclusive of taxes and subsidies) could be managed in a manner that would be socially efficient (including procedurally effi cient and fair), as well as reasonably attain certain distributional goals of stability and fairness. I have written a book (1980) and more than a dozen articles (as well as contributions to government reports) on how these criteria could be met and it is now agreed that this work, for the fi rst time, has shown a way to operationalize traditional welfare economics criteria. My own work has shown that it can also be operationalized in practical public policy, from the planning and management of the government telephone system to the management of global environmental and natural resources.
As a supervisor of people in the traditional government work environment, I was the operational "chief economist" of the Agency for International Development (a foreign service designated position) during 1983-85, responsible for the final approval for all nonproject U.S. economic development assistance, the development of policy papers and guidances on economic development assistance, and research on new approaches to development assistance (e. g. privatization). My office, which coordinated A.I.D.'s "strategic assessment' capabilities involved supervision of up to 8 FTE professionals and 2 secretaries. In addition, I worked for 3 years as the Mission economist and