Stanley Mulaik
Friend of CSBS
Retired Professor
Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech)
Stanley Allen Mulaik has had a long association with the U. In 1939, at age 4, he began his schooling at the University of Utah in the Nursery School in the Home Economics department . (His parents were students, then faculty in the biology department next door). He next attended kindergarten in 1940 in Stewart School diagonally across the street (which later became the Anthropology Department) and went on for the next 9 years there to 'graduate' in 9th grade In 1950. He attended next East High for two years, then came back to the U as a Freshman and Ford Scholar in 1952.
He graduated with a B.S. in biology and secondary education and an R.O.T.C. commission as second lieutenant in the United States Army Reserves in 1956. In the reserves he rose to Captain and retired from the reserves in 1970. But he entered graduate school at the U in the Department of Psychology in 1957 and obtained an M.A. in psychology in 1962, and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the U in 1963. In 1963 he also married Jane Stacy while they were both working together on a research project under Professor Calvin W. Taylor on Measurement and Prediction of Nursing Performance. She was faculty in the School of Nursing at the U.
Subsequently he switched careers from clinical to quantitative and industrial psychology and accepted a post-doctoral fellowship in quantitative psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in 1966. Next he was hired by UNC as an assistant professor in the Psychology department. In 1970 he accepted a position as an associate professor in the School of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and rose to full professor. He taught statistics, personality theories, factor analysis, multivariate analysis, and structural equation modeling until he retired in 2000. However, he stayed on and taught part time graduate courses in quantitative psychology until the School found his replacement in 2005. He is author and co-author of several books among which are Foundations of Factor Analysis, Linear Causal Modeling with Structural Equations, and Interlingua Grammar and Method.
He and his wife live in Marietta, Georgia. They have two sons and four grandchildren, 3 girls and a boy. A granddaughter is living with them while attending Kennesaw State University, which is a few miles from their home.
Stanley stays active on the internet in posting to listserv's on structural equation modeling and interlingua. He has a recent new interest in Modern Monetary Theory, and has concluded that the so-called national debt problem is not a real problem, consisting mostly of U.S. Treasury securities purchased by investors, whose money is not used to fund deficit spending, while the Federal Reserve has bought with quantitative easing most of the securities held by the banks bought by them in connection with deficit spending. The Feds will extinguish them in swaps for new securities with the Treasury, which the Feds will sell to the public and banks if serious inflation develops in the future, to draw money out of circulation and reduce inflation. He has also worked out an equation on the economy that is a simple differential equation equivalent to a basic equation in hydrology on change in amount of water in bodies of water as functions of inflows and outflows of water. It shows that inflows and outflows of money from various sources into and from circulation should be balanced against each other when the economy reaches full production and employment at stable prices. During deflations more money needs to inflow into than out of circulation and during inflations more must outflow from circulation than inflow. At full production and employment inflows must equal outflows to maintain an optimal level of money in circulation. He also shows that balanced budgets (spending equaling taxes) could cause disasters in certain circumstances.