Background
Melville Jack Ulmer was born on May 7, 1911, in New York City, New York, United States.
New York, NY 10003, United States
In 1937, Ulmer received a Bachelor of Science, and a Master of Arts in 1938, from New York University.
116th St & Broadway, New York, NY 10027, United States
In 1948, Ulmer received a Doctor of Philosophy from Columbia University.
Melville Jack Ulmer was born on May 7, 1911, in New York City, New York, United States.
In 1937, Ulmer received a Bachelor of Science, and a Master of Arts in 1938, from New York University. In 1948, he also received a Doctor of Philosophy from Columbia University.
Dr. Ulmer came to the Washington area in 1940 to join the Bureau of Labor Statistics and became chief of the general price research section. From 1948 to 1950, he edited the Commerce Department publication Survey of Current Business. He was affiliated with American University from 1950 to 1960, becoming chairman of its economics department. He was an economics professor at the University of Maryland from 1961 to 1986. He was a contributing editor at the New Republic magazine from 1970 to 1979.
In his writings for The Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, American Spectator and Wall Street Journal, Dr. Ulmer advocated minimum-wage increases and other pro-union stances.
His interest in economic fluctuations and in stabilization policies began as a student of Wesley C. Mitchell. As a side issue, when still at Columbia, Ulmer explored the theory of consumer choice and its application to the economic theory of cost of living index numbers. Here, in his doctor’s dissertation, he developed a model that has remained the starting point for most studies of this subject since that date.
Later, at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Ulmer came closer to the main theme of his interest in a study of long-term trends and cycles in the regulated industries, which required the development of entirely new data on capital formation for the years from 1870 to 1950. From that point onward he concentrated more directly on the central problem of economic stabilization. In The Welfare State: United States of America, Ulmer developed what he believes was the first analysis and explanation for the phenomenon that was later on generally termed ‘stagflation’.
There and in subsequent articles he also developed, through the application of the balanced budget multiplier, a scheme for achieving full employment without inflation by means of a nationally coordinated public employment program, accompanied by appropriate fiscal and monetary policies.
For proper execution, the plan just referred to would require a level of public administration and rigorous supervision which in subsequent years, through the 1970s, seemed to grow even more distant from possible realization. In more recent studies Ulmer explored the alternative possibility of strengthening and expanding the range of automatic stabilizers. Coordinate studies led him to the analysis of revenue-sharing, in which he exposed as early as 1970 the difficulties that more than a decade later led to a general disenchantment with this fiscal device.
Ulmer's most recent studies have been in the broader problems of public finance, including fiscal policy, and in perhaps the broadest of all topics, economic methodology. Also, in 1980 he formulated a statistical analysis demonstrating a close relationship between the per capita volume of multinational corporation investment in Third World countries and the rates of economic growth prevailing in these countries, a finding that he also related to the progress of capitalism in the Third World.
Ulmer was a Fulbright lecturer, a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Ulmer was married to Naomi Ulmer of Potomac. He also had a son, Melville P. Ulmer of Evanston, a daughter, Stephanie Ulmer, and three grandchildren.