R.I.P. | Michael Intriligator, Peace and Security Strategist

Michael Intriligator
(1938-2014)

I was greatly saddened to hear today of the recent death from cancer of Prof. Michael Intriligator of UCLA. I got to know Mike on a November 1990 visit to Moscow and other Russian cities during a two-week business mission and conference on military conversion in the newly opened-up Soviet Union.

The event was co-sponsored by the Council on Economic Priorities and the Moscow-based Institute of World Economy and International Affairs (IMEMO). One of the questions before the conference was whether what was left of the Soviet Union would allow economy-wide market forces to do the job of converting military resources to civilian ones (guns to butter) or whether it would be done "narrowly", factory by factory, based on instructions from above.

While Sovietologists (themselves a soon-to-be-extinct species) were debating the latter idea, the former took place. Workers couldn't wait for a government conversion program. In the interim they weren't being paid. So in many cases they took with them what they could carry from the factories in lieu of payment, and they tried to create new businesses or work for someone else who was starting up a new entity.

Mike made his academic reputation early on in mathematical economics and econometrics, and was able to divide his time between writing and editing quantitative-oriented handbooks, which came easily to him, and international policy research which I had the feeling became his major passion later in life.

UCLA's announcement of Mike's death. He has been at
UCLA since 1963.

He wanted to contribute to peace–a realistic peace that recognized the existence of rogues and rogue states and rogue alliances.

When Mike joined our conference on conversion he was Director of the Center of International and Strategic Studies.

He was proud of having academic appointments in both the Economics and Political Science Departments at UCLA. (Later, he added a third, Public Policy.)

His biographical listings feature several contributions he made to furthering "Global Security After the End of the Cold War," the title of his Presidential Address to the Peace Science Society in 1994.

He also wrote about health policy and back in 1993 favored expansion of Medicare - the single-payer system that looks even better from the vantage point of 2014 than it did a quarter-century ago. He was frequently invited to serve as an expert witness on health economic issues for two decades.

Mike Intriligator (L) and President Jimmy Carter.

He received his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT after receiving an M.A. from Yale, where he was the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship..

His earliest work involved the development of models and analytic frameworks using economics, decision theory, control theory and other tools to analyze and better understand fundamental economic and societal problems.  He wrote the standard work on Mathematical Optimization and Economic Theory (1971), now in its 13th printing.

His later work shifted toward identifying real policy options in the areas of health care reform and global security. He was concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and this led him to share the conference interest in strategies for a transition from a militaristic economy in Russia to one that would cater more to consumers. Mike was interested in how conversion would affect income distribution and enterprise restructuring, and he was interested in the role of institutions in converting from a dirigiste to a market economy.

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, he has tackled the thorniest geopolitical issues, such as arms races, arms control, nuclear proliferation, accidental nuclear war, and paths toward global security.

He has testified before the U.S. Commission on Improving the Effectiveness of the United Nations and served as a consultant to the Center for National Security Studies at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and other organizations.

Mike at an ECAAR panel, AEA
meetings 1995. Photo by JT Marlin.

From 1982 to 1992, he directed the UCLA Center for International and Strategic Affairs. A member of the editorial boards of Economic Directions, Defense and Peace Economics and Conflict Management and Peace Science, he wrote or edited more than 200 professional and general articles and scholarly texts.

A fellow of the Econometric Society, Intriligator was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

After we returned from the conversion conference in Moscow, Mike and I served together for many years as officers and members of the Executive Committee of Economists Allied for Arms Reduction (ECAAR). For the next decade he was Vice Chairman and I was Treasurer, the second Treasurer in ECAAR's history because the founder, Robert Schwartz, put himself from the beginning in the Treasurer position.

Mike was always eager to help with projects and fund-raising, the latter being a rarer offering among volunteers. He could always be counted on to review documents before publication and he invariably provided needed and useful comments. During all the years we worked together at ECAAR he went out of his way to show respect for other people (everyone had a seat at the table) and he called anyone out who appeared to be deviating from this principle.

His obituary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, where a Guest Book may be signed. Mike used to talk, with justifiable pride, of his wife Devrie, a well-known space physicist, and their four sons - Kenneth (married to Gina), a professor of Physics at UCSD; James (married to Susanne), a professor of Psychology and Innovation at Bangor University in the UK; William (married to Lisa), a symphony orchestra conductor and director in Dubuque, Iowa and Cheyenne, Wyo.; Robert, a Los Angeles composer of music; and nine grandchildren. His brother, Marc Intriligator (married to Roxann) is a New York real estate lawyer.

Mike's family has asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the American Cancer Society or to the Michael D. Intriligator Memorial Fund at Economists for Peace and Security, Levy Institute, Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504 (to make an online donation go to this link).

Rebalancing the Military Budget - The Long Tail of Personnel Costs

The VA tries to help returning vets
with "Welcome Home" parties.

Economists for Peace and Security has just published a newsletter with some timely information on the sequestration of discretionary funds. One such article is by Harvard JFK School Lecturer, Linda Bilmes, in the March 2013 newsletter. It has a wealth of information on the long spending tail of returning veterans, since an increasing number come home with disabilities.

If the sequestration program turns out some day to have had some value, it will be in forcing an overdue rebalancing of the military budget. Bilmes shows how the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were grossly underestimated by the U.S. Government officials who initiated them, something I have written about before on Huffington Post.  

One reason costs are rising is that military benefits are a churning wake behind each age cohort, and they are rising fast because recent wars have fewer fatalities and many more injuries, both physical and mental. 

• The peak year for World War I veterans' benefits was not until 1969. It's a long, long fuse. 
• The peak year for World War II veterans' benefits was 1976. 
• Vietnam? Too early to say - costs are still rising! 
• The first Gulf War?  A short war, but we are spending $5 billion a year on benefits.
• Iraq and Afghanistan? A long war - a huge budget impact, raising many huge questions.

America is going to have to pay these costs, and they will crowd out other military spending as the sequester program puts a lid on on overall spending. For budget experts, and for young men and women entering military duty, these trends should be worrisome.

For anyone who believes, as I do, that we should do everything possible to ensure that those who serve their country are properly prepared for the trauma of war, and are properly treated, one question is whether the underestimation of post-service spending is resulting in inadequate allowances for the cost of physical and mental injuries sustained by those who have served, and the impact of this on their famuily..  

Did you know that:

• Someone serving 19.5 years in the military gets no pension (it has to be 20 years)? 
• Only 17 percent of military personnel stay long enough to qualify for any retirement benefit?
• Seven out of ten reservists do not have health insurance?

Start with the fact that military pay and health care are one-third of the DoD budget and are rising, and the need for budget rebalancing becomes obvious. Personnel costs have risen 90 percent since FY2001, when the United States invaded Afghanistan in search of bin Laden. Yet active duty troop numbers have risen less than 3 percent since before the invasion.

One place to look for savings is in the health care insurance programs. The Veterans Administration is a single-payer operation and ought to be less costly than an insurance-based system. Not in the article by Bilmes is a report that private insurance premiums exceeded $5,100/year as of May 2012.  Health care costs for a family of four covered by workplace health insurance exceeded $20,000 for the first time ever in 2012, rising to $20,728 - $1,335 more than in 2011. The premium component is for a preferred provider organization (PPO) plan, a common type of health insurance. In addition, those covered paid $3,470 in out-of-pocket costs, such as co-payments for doctor visits and prescription drugs. The rest of the cost of the health insurance is paid by employers. 

Private health insurance premiums have nearly doubled in the 2001-2011 decade. Military personnel are covered by Tricare health insurance. It includes both active-duty military and their families, and retirees -- 10 million people. During the decade, subsidized Tricare premiums have fallen by 21 percent. Naturally, more of the military are signing up for the subsidized Tricare system, jumping from 29 to 52 percent. By keeping premiums down, taxpayer costs are rising. 

A Tricare for Life program supplements Medicare and is expected to grow significantly in coming years.Also, Tricare is being expanded to reserve troops, only 70 per cent of whom have health insurance. Under ObamaCare, the percentage will rise to 89 percent.

The VA has expanded greatly over the past ten years. For example, claims for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder are easier to apply for. VA can't keep up with the volume of claims.

Support for vets in Congress is high. For example, long-term care for disabilities is being urged whether or not the retirement age is lowered below 20 years. During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, 2.2 million troops have been deployed to the war zones. Of them, 1.6 million have been discharged and 700,000 have filed claims for disability. The approval rate (in whole or part) for the these claims so far is 97%. Another 1.5 million claims are expected this year. The VA budget has grown from $60 billion in 2004 to $125 billion in 2012; for FY 2014 the VA is asking for $140+ billion.

VA and Tricare are the fastest-growing components of the national security budget, analogous to the GM pensions and health-care costs that required a bailout of the company. However, the VA disability system has become a default pension system.

In 2004 and 2005, the Bush Administration raised military pay to improve recruiting. In the last 10 years, says the CBO, military pay has outpaced private-sector pay by 25%. Recruiting is no longer a problem.

We are going to have to rebalance our military spending in a way that does more for our military personnel while giving the taxpayer more transparency and a better idea of where the money is going.