Michael McCracken, known for his interest in food and seasonings, is photographed at The Urban Element culinary venue and cooking school. Mr. McCracken died in Ottawa on Sept. 28 at the age of 75.Carole Doucet
In 1970, five years after arriving in Canada, 30-year-old Oklahoma-born economist Michael McCracken led the development of a landmark project at the Economic Council of Canada to provide the first highly detailed forecasts of the Canadian economy over the long term.
The CANDIDE econometric model – unique for its time in generating big-picture and industry-specific insights – was a signature accomplishment for Mr. McCracken, who died in Ottawa on Sept. 28 at the age of 75.
"It was new stuff and quite an achievement," recalls economist Munir Sheikh, the former chief statistician of Canada who began his career at the council in 1972. "We all thought he was the father of the models."
From the outset of Mr. McCracken's economic modelling career – which included his role as the first project manager for CANDIDE (Canadian Disaggregated Inter-Departmental Econometric model), from 1970 to 72 – he was a staunch believer in the value of sharing information as widely as possible.
"He was always keen on having data accessible to everyone," recalls Keith May, a long-time friend and business associate. "He felt the more eyes on the data, the better it would become."
That enthusiasm for explaining and debating economic trends made him a go-to source for journalists, from the 1970s onward, leading him to appear regularly on CBC TV and other media outlets to comment on federal budgets, election results and government policies.
"He was one of the first Canadian economists to be able to play that role," says Don Newman, who was host of CBC Newsworld's Politics program for 20 years until 2009. "Particularly on live television, where I used him, he was very good at explaining what he believed and holding his corner."
Recruited to Canada in 1965 by Arthur J.R. Smith, then-chairman of the Economic Council, Mr. McCracken parlayed his technical expertise into a 40-year career as the president and chief executive officer of Informetrica Ltd., one of Canada's few privately owned forecasting firms, which he founded with fellow economist Carl Sonnen.
Over that time, Mr. McCracken became a vocal advocate of "full employment" policies, putting him at odds with the deficit and inflation-fighting preoccupations of successive federal governments over the past several decades.
He made no apologies for a stance that sometimes produced barbed criticisms of potential clients in government.
"In the last 50 years, I have accomplished little except to anger some politicians and bureaucrats by my repeated calls for full employment," Mr. McCracken told the Progressive Economic Forum in 2012 on receiving its biennial John Kenneth Galbraith Prize for "a lifetime contribution to economics and social justice in Canada." He added: "I pass the torch (or megaphone) to you! … Lower unemployment remains the most important goal for the economy!"
His daughter Catherine (Cricket) McCracken says, "One of the best things about Dad is that he never forgot that all the numbers, charts, graphs and data points represented people."
Those who felt the sting of Mr. McCracken's sometimes caustic commentary say he never wavered in his view that, as former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge puts it, "you could always trade off a little bit more inflation for a lot better employment."
Despite their divergent views, including during Mr. Dodge's tenure as deputy minister of finance from 1992 to 1997, he says Mr. McCracken "made a big contribution in the sense of being an advocate for, and provider of, macro-economic modelling.
"That sounds like plumbing, but it is a hell of a lot more than plumbing because it does influence a lot about how people think about the economy."
Don Drummond, a former senior finance department official in the 1990s who later served as chief economist of TD Bank until 2010, describes Mr. McCracken as "a pioneer in Canada in the econometric modelling business."
Like other top government officials (including then-Bank of Canada governor John Crow in the late 1980s and early 1990s), Mr. Drummond was a target of Mr. McCracken's blunt criticism.
"He has been the most consistent presence of anybody in the public policy scene in Canada with that particular view that Canada should be operating at a very low rate of unemployment," Mr. Drummond says. Since 1984, he adds, "the whole history of the Canadian government has been progressively going further and further in the opposite direction of what Mike was calling for."
The consistency of Mr. McCracken's views was a hallmark, according to Jim Stanford, an economist with Unifor, Canada's largest private sector union.
"When he started his career, he was smack-dab in the mainstream of economics and then the whole profession shifted so much to the right over his career that by the time he died he was clearly on the significant left of the profession," says Mr. Stanford, a founding chairman of the Progressive Economics Forum. "It was not because he changed his views but because the rest of the profession changed theirs."
Though Mr. McCracken's outspoken public views rarely swayed government policy-makers, his behind-the-scenes impact was significant, says University of Alberta economist Alice Nakamura, who served with him on the national accounts advisory committee of Statistics Canada.
At coffee breaks and informal sessions, she recalls, he campaigned quietly and ultimately successfully for Statistics Canada to share its data freely with private sector users instead of charging a premium fee.
"He was a person in the private sector who especially recognized and believed in the value of information-based decision-making for public and private policy," she says, praising his ability to bridge the worlds of academic and non-academic economists.
He was a driving force – committing his own company's funds – in establishing the Canadian Association for Business Economics, a forum for public policy discussions attended by industry, government and academia.
In 1991, with others, he founded the Canadian Employment Research Forum to foster research and debate on employment issues. "Mike was the one who got on the stump and raised a lot of money for it," says Prof. Nakamura, a forum member. "He was an economist in the mode of action."
In 2010, the Canadian Economics Association established the Mike McCracken Award for Economic Statistics, recognizing theoretical and applied contributions to the development or use of economic statistics in Canada.
Born in Tulsa, Okla., one of three children of Austin Ralph McCracken and the former Athanell Hall, Michael Clark McCracken grew up in Germany, Hawaii, California and Japan (his father served in the U.S. military). While earning a bachelor's degree in economics at Rice University in Houston, he met, and in 1960 married, Catherine Mary Doyle. After 45 years of marriage, she died in 2005.
With a deferment from the United States military, Mr. McCracken completed his master's degree in economics from Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1964.
One year later, he joined the Economic Council of Canada, though he returned to the United States to fulfill his military service obligations (he was an Army captain) as an economist with the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington from 1967 to 70.
It was at the agency that he met Mr. Sonnen, with whom he founded Informetrica in 1972 as a quantitative economic research and consulting company. Over the years, the company (it wound up operations in 2013) became a training ground for young economists, many of whom later joined the federal government.
At Informetrica, Mr. McCracken and his colleagues developed their own CANDIDE-like large-scale econometric model of the Canadian economy, known as The Informetrica Model or TIM, with the capacity to drill into sub-sectors of the economy and generate 20-year forecasts.
It was not an inexpensive undertaking, recalls economist Paul Jacobson, who spent 20 years at Informetrica. "It almost broke the bank; it took an extraordinary scale of resources," he says. "It was a measure of Mike's commitment to what he wanted to do professionally that he found the resources to do it."
That capability for long-range analysis proved relevant for industry proponents and government regulators of megaprojects, with Informetrica asked to model the long-term effects of the proposed Alaska Highway Pipeline Project and, more recently, the economic impact of taking action on climate change.
Throughout his career, Mr. McCracken "took leading-edge analytic techniques and applied them," Mr. Sonnen says. "That is my notion of a builder."
To the sometimes arcane world of economics and statistics, Mr. McCracken injected wry humour.
In an economic analysis of Robert Frost's poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, he concluded: "Project goals: to watch woods fill up with snow; Risks of project: could get caught by owner of woods."
A life-long food enthusiast – especially New Orleans cuisine, home-made dry rub and barbecuing – he took particular pleasure in assembling disparate groups of people to explore new restaurants in Ottawa.
"Up until the last minute he was bringing us new clients and was very supportive of our business," says Carley Schelck, a partner and chief executive officer of The Urban Element, a culinary venue and cooking school that opened 10 years ago, with Mr. McCracken among the first visitors. "We would put on events and classes that he would recommend, or would want to take and he could surely fill them [the classes]."
Mr. McCracken leaves his partner, Carole Doucet; and children, Mary Margaret, George and Cricket. The cause of his death has not yet been confirmed. A celebration of his life is being planned.
Jennifer Lewington was a friend of Mike McCracken.
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