Wealth & Money Quote by Merton Miller

There is a quiet flex buried in Miller's understatement. "My expertise was in public finance" sounds like a modest CV line, but the second clause tightens the frame: not just theory, but corporate taxation, and not just study, but the US Treasury. It's credentialing disguised as recollection, a way of establishing authority without declaring it. Economists often traffic in abstraction; Treasury is the messy back room where abstractions collide with lobbying, loopholes, and political deadlines. Miller is telling you he has seen the machinery, not just the model.

The specificity matters. "Public finance" can read like a broad, academic category; "particularly corporate taxation" signals the hard edge of distributional conflict, where policy decides winners and losers and where "efficiency" arguments double as ideological cover. In the mid-20th century, corporate taxes were a central battleground: postwar growth, Cold War state-building, and a rapidly professionalizing economics discipline all raised the stakes. An economist with Treasury experience could speak both languages: the technocrat's spreadsheet and the policymaker's compromise.

The line also foreshadows Miller's larger intellectual brand. As a pioneer of modern finance, he spent his career clarifying when institutions matter and when they don't. Here, he positions himself as someone whose sophistication comes from proximity to institutions. The subtext is pragmatic: before you argue about how taxes "should" work, you need to know how they actually get written, enforced, and avoided.