Prophet of Boom (and Bust)
It may take another heretic to pull America out of its current downhill slide this time around. If so, North Texas has one to offer.
Batra never intended to become an economist. After graduating from high school in New Delhi with perfect grades, he announced to his father that he wished to pursue an engineering career, like his friends.
His father had other ideas. Harish Batra wanted his highly intelligent son to become a top government official via the Indian Administrative Services (IAS), and thought that economics would be the best way to get there.
"Students with A grades used to go into engineering, and I wanted to go into engineering. But my dad just insisted that I go into economics," Batra said. "I didn't even know what economics was!"
Now 95 and still healthy, the elder Batra has translated some of his son's books into Hindi. And he's thrilled with his son's success, even though he didn't end up in Indian government.
"He never imagined that people would be reading my books even though he doesn't know the story of half the opposition I've had," Batra said. "He sometimes says, 'See, I put you into the right area.' I'm happy he put me into this, too."
Batra emigrated to this country in 1966 and earned his Ph.D. in 1969 at Southern Illinois University. He taught at several schools before taking an assistant professorship at SMU in 1972. He was already forming some out-of-the-mainstream economic views, including about wealth concentration, but he knew they'd be unpopular, especially in Big D. So he played it safe for a while, writing books and journal articles on highly technical economics issues.
"I wanted to get tenure before I would venture into anything risky," he said.
He earned tenure in just a year, in part because he was already boosting SMU's ranking for publications in national journals. Prior to his arrival, the university's faculty ranked 99th in overall journal publishing; three years after his arrival, it was 15th.
At SMU, his intelligence and credentials earned respect, though he hasn't always been understood or appreciated.
"He was seen in the economics department as not fitting in very well," said Glenn Linden, a distinguished professor of history at SMU who worked with Batra on an early book. "But I felt he was a voice that should be heard."
Batra, too, felt it was time to take the next step and to begin going public with the contrarian theories that would bring him both fame and isolation.
In 1987, Batra wrote the book The Great Depression of 1990. When that downturn didn't happen, the appetite for his articles in scholarly journals dried up. Batra and his supporters point out that most of the other predictions in the book have happened, just on a different timeline. Thom Hartmann, who has featured Batra regularly on Air America's nationally syndicated "The Thom Hartmann Program" for the past several years, believes Batra might have been right about hard times in the 1990s had foreign countries such as China not loaned the U.S. so much money, which essentially delayed a big depression until, you got it, right about now.
Batra speaks somberly about suffering in those years after the flawed prediction, both from reduced income - he missed out on promotions, pay raises, and job opportunities - and professional status. The personal nature of some of the criticism was the most difficult for him.
"Quite often people, instead of ridiculing the theories, ridiculed me personally, thinking that I wanted to benefit by sensationalizing my message and trying to get attention from the public," he said about the 1990 book. "And the fact was that I suffered personally, and my family suffered, too, because of airing these views."
But the futurist never lost faith in himself or his ideas. He kept writing, he said, to "challenge the profession."
"If Barack Obama is a truly transformation president ," Hartmann said, "then I think Ravi Batra will [become] one of the most prominent economists in the country."
There's no reason, he said, that Batra couldn't make the same rise from obscurity to ubiquity as happened to economist Milton Friedman when President Ronald Reagan endorsed his supply-side, trickle-down theories of economics and deregulation. And revolutionary economic theories have won the day before then - most particularly when the belated adoption of John Maynard Keynes' ideas helped pull America and the world out of the Great Depression. Keynesian economics, which Batra's theories resemble on some levels, asserts that government plays a role in spurring economic activity in the private sector through public projects, progressive taxation, and interest rates.
It's no wonder, though, that Batra's predictions and recommendations haven't been popular on the national stage in recent years. He considers the advantages of free trade to be highly overrated and thinks higher income tax rates would help the economy. He's certainly not the first person to suggest that dramatically increasing tax rates on the rich would help the economy. The argument has been made before - and is popping up again.
At the core of nearly all his predictions (detailed on his web site, www.ravibatra.com) is the premise that an increasing gap between rich and poor can destroy a society. Not exactly a program that either Bush president would have endorsed.
