During his tenure at MIT, he moonlighted both as the first president of that association and as president of the American Statistical Association. In the early twentieth century, the economics program at MIT aimed to prepare undergraduates for leadership roles in business. During those years, economics as a discipline was gaining greater prominence both here and abroad.
Some have drawn the connection with the old sequencing debate, common in the economic literature for some decades. The broad thrust of this message was that the most general, ubiquitous and far-reaching elements of deregulation should be done last.