Three years ago, Harvard Economics Professor James Stembel Duesenberry declined an invitation to join the nation's most influential body of economic consultants, the three-member White House Council of Economic Advisers. He pleaded that he was too busy with a half-finished research project on U.S. capital markets. Last week the invitation came again—and this time Duesenberry accepted. "This isn't the year to say 'let somebody else do it,' " he says. "The problems are not going to be simple."
True enough. Duesenberry, 47, will arrive in Washington at a pivotal time in the council's 19-year history: just when the economy needs...