(FORTUNE Magazine) – LESTER THUROW, liberal economist, guides his van through Boston's idiosyncratic traffic, his radar detector switched off for the short run to Logan Airport. A flight to Washington will take him to a symposium of the World Economic Forum, where he will tell a roomful of European businessmen his worries about foreign debt, recession, and productivity. By the time he has finished, the other panelists are no more than straight men, feeding him lines to use as springboards for witty retorts. Should the U.S. return to a gold standard, asks one participant? No, says Thurow, that would play into the hands of a big gold producer like the Soviet Union. ''And that,'' he says, ''would be like electing Gorbachev head of the Federal Reserve Board.'' From now until November 1988, Thurow will play economic guru to another group of straight men: the corps of Democratic presidential aspirants. Should one of them win, Thurow is a likely choice to head the Council of Economic Advisers, giving him a key role in shaping economic policy. He appeals to candidates like Missouri Representative Richard Gephardt, Illinois Senator Paul Simon, and former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt with an unlikely blend of government interventionism and free-market ideology. That combination of ideas has put him in an unusual position for a liberal: He has detractors on the left and defenders on the right. Thurow is a committed egalitarian but wants to show he has a tough head to go with his soft heart. He is a brilliant speaker, a masterful teacher, a prolific writer of elegant prose. Sometimes he is glib, and he is not averse to letting people know of his accomplishments, most recently his appointment as dean of the Sloan School of Management at MIT. With curly blond hair and lean, angular features, Thurow is handsome in a way that seems right for someone who grew up in Montana, and his warm, easy humor makes even a stranger feel at home. A young 49, he runs, skis, and climbs mountains. He is sharp stepping off the red-eye. Bobby Kennedy would have liked Lester Thurow. His prescription for economic health leaves a big role for government in boosting productivity, which in his view is America's most persistent long- term ailment. He advocates using a stick to encourage Japan to buy American, and endorses the Gephardt amendment to the trade bill recently passed by the House of Representatives. Like most political liberals today, Thurow is a fiscal conservative, one who favors a big tax increase to reduce the deficit, including a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax. He separates himself from run-of-the- mill Democrats -- and presumably horrifies a number of them -- by proposing repeal of corporate income taxes, antitrust laws, and insider trading laws. One man's horror is another man's common sense. Thurow argues that killing the corporate tax would leave more money for badly needed investment. Getting rid of antitrust laws would permit collaboration between companies to develop new technologies more quickly. Insider trading laws, in his view, are unenforceable, and thus harm small investors by giving them a false sense of security. Better simply to warn investors that the game may be rigged. Thurow has eschewed the learned journals of his profession to pursue a wider audience. He writes regularly for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other lay publications. Going direct to the people -- with clear, readable prose, no less -- has not endeared him to his colleagues. Neither has his $ generalist's approach, which takes Thurow well beyond the territory covered by the typical number-cruncher. The giggle among economists is that Les Thurow's real name is Less Thorough. ''That doesn't bother me at all,'' says Thurow. ''I've heard that one since high school. It's just too good a pun.'' His parents didn't realize they were marking him for ignominy; back when his kin emigrated from Russia, the family name was pronounced Turov. The son of a Methodist minister, Thurow was born in Livingston, Montana, not far from Yellowstone National Park. His father moved from parish to parish every few years, exposing Thurow repeatedly to the prairie supposition that if your father is a man of the cloth you must be a sissy. He recalls, ''It usually meant that when I moved to a new town I had to have a couple of fistfights to prove I could defend myself.'' EVENTUALLY the family settled in the copper town of Anaconda, and Thurow spent four summers working in the mines in nearby Butte. The experience left him mildly claustrophobic. ''If anything went wrong,'' he says, ''there was no getting out.'' He narrowly escaped death once when a four-inch steel cable snapped and whipped around, shearing in half a man standing a few feet away. That was enough. Thurow went east to Williams College in Massachusetts and, after a detour to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, to Harvard for a Ph.D. in economics. Next came a stint on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers, where he fought in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. He returned to Harvard to teach economics and might be there still if not for tragic events. Thurow's wife fell ill with a degenerative kidney disease. After exhausting his allotment of health insurance money at Harvard he became more amenable to MIT's overtures. He moved there in 1968; his wife died a short time later. Thurow's personal life in the 1960s mirrored his professional preoccupations. ''Back when people were interested in civil rights,'' he recalls, ''a whole group of us lived in Roxbury, a black neighborhood in Boston, for about ten years.'' He and his neighbors coexisted peacefully, but when integration of the city schools triggered violence in the streets, Thurow found it hard to be white in a black neighborhood. By 1975 he had remarried and his first son was born. The family decamped to the suburbs. HIS FIRST BIG ROLE in presidential politicking came in 1972, when he advised George McGovern. His performance in the McGovern campaign is one of the reasons, he thinks, that some people still regard him as a ''red Marxist.'' Thurow was a co-author of the infamous plan to replace the welfare system with a negative income tax -- a plan best known for its proposal to send everyone an annual check for $1,000. In a TV debate with Hubert Humphrey, McGovern wasn't able to explain why the plan wouldn't cost $230 billion a year. Thurow's answer was simple: Much of the money would be taxed back from the non-poor. But the giveaway became an economic fiasco for McGovern. Thurow has since changed his slant on inequality. Instead of asking the government to redistribute earnings, he would prefer companies to close the gap between high and low salaries. He favors the Japanese approach of giving all workers, not just the top dogs, part of their salaries in twice-yearly bonuses tied to company profits. Such a policy, Thurow believes, would encourage a sense of common pursuit and hence greater productivity. ''This might be a case where efficiency and equity go together,'' he says. Also, workers might save more of a big check than they do of their normal pay. Thurow has changed his lifestyle significantly since the 1970s. He and his wife, Gretchen, and sons Torben, 14, and Ethan, 10, live in Lincoln, a salubrious town about 25 minutes from MIT. In Massachusetts even well-heeled suburbs have Democratic town councils, and Thurow finds time for what he calls ''grass-roots politics at a very grassy level.'' FOR A WHILE he maintained contact with Roxbury when a black child from the neighborhood lived in his Lincoln home so she could attend a suburban school. The practice recalled his youth in Montana, when rural children from areas where roads weren't cleared of snow stayed with his family in town so they could get to class. In the summer Lester and his two younger brothers would live in the country -- a balance of payments, so to speak. A man who worries about productivity is naturally concerned with competitiveness. Thurow has proposed a National Science Foundation for industry, an organization that would spur competitiveness by putting up cash for cooperative ventures with groups of companies in promising technologies. Some of Thurow's other ideas have greater shock value. In the 1970s he co- authored a manifesto suggesting fines on firms where women and minorities were underrepresented. And he does tend to be a doomsayer. Referring to America's status as the world's largest debtor nation, Thurow predicts that Germany and Japan will do to the U.S. what the U.S. has done to Mexico: lend it money till it can't afford the payments, then impose fiscal restraints as a condition for further loans. Before you climb out on your window ledge, remember that a few years ago he wrote: ''By the early 1980s talk of another Great Depression could no longer be dismissed as kooky; it had become a genuine possibility.'' As former Sloan School dean William Pounds says, ''Lester has been a little bit pessimistic about the world.'' Why does a smart man say such alarming things? Thurow's public positions spring less from ingenuousness than from a desire to be provocative. He argues that Americans respond only to dramatic events -- Sputnik, for example. Because the launch of the Soviet satellite was perceived as a crisis, massive spending on education followed. Today's 25% high school dropout rate -- a true crisis -- goes unheeded. Thurow wants to explode a bomb under America's collective consciousness. He is also seeking a Democratic candidate willing to drop some bombs. The next President, Thurow believes, should spend plenty of money on research and development and education. He should be willing to clamp down on consumer credit by eliminating no-money-down purchases, and to impose a value-added tax (a national sales tax on all goods). Thurow also proposes replacing the personal income tax with a progressive consumption tax based on what people spend. That's a lot of taxation, and Thurow has yet to find his man. He laments that candidates don't run on a platform anymore; they just run. ''They're testing various themes to see what resonates with voters, and they'll either see it in the polls or in the whites of people's eyes,'' he says. Babbitt and Simon, while full of praise for Thurow's originality, reject many of his ideas on taxes and antitrust legislation. These are precisely the ideas that give him influence beyond the traditional pale of liberal politics. Without them, Thurovian economic philosophy is reduced to more standard public policy. Thurow may find that candidates will use his name to buy credibility, then strip his program of the features that make it novel. THAT WOULD BE a comedown for Thurow, though much different from the one last January that landed him in his new post at the Sloan School. Thurow was climbing Mount Aconcagua in Argentina when he fell 60 feet down the slope, sandblasting the skin from one leg. On other occasions, as on his trips up Mount McKinley and to the Himalayas, he had found mountaineering a good way to clear his mind. ''If you're on a very narrow ledge 1,000 feet up,'' he says, ''you will forget about the next article.'' But now, in enforced solitude at the base camp, he filled the time by setting himself mental tasks. One was to decide what he would do if he were head of the Sloan School, a job he had been offered before his trip and intended to decline. The more he thought about it that day, the better it sounded. ''If I hadn't injured my leg,'' he says, ''I undoubtedly wouldn't be dean of the Sloan School.'' The ''Less Thorough'' tag must be a lingering annoyance to him, despite his protestations to the contrary. Many people think the criticism is unfair. ''There is the notion that anyone who writes for a larger audience must be intellectually defective,'' says Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who writes for a very large audience. Thurow has defenders on the right as well. ''He doesn't get up and BS,'' says Murray L. Weidenbaum, Reagan's first chief economic adviser. ''There's a significant amount of analysis underlying his points. And he's very much aware of what it takes to enhance the competitiveness of American business.'' Still, Thurow admits there is some substance to the gibe. ''Since I've written about so many different subjects,'' he says, ''I can't have been a great scholar in all of them.'' WHAT, THEN, does he bring to the game? For one thing, immense enthusiasm, which can be overwhelming. ''Having a conversation with Lester,'' says Babbitt, ''is a little like trying to drink out of a fire hydrant.'' For another, lucidity. ''The value of somebody like Thurow is that he can write,'' says Galbraith. Why has he risked spreading himself so thin? ''It might partly be because he can,'' says MIT colleague Paul Krugman. ''He's an incredibly able and intelligent person. He's one of the best expositors of economic ideas we've ever seen.'' He would surely like to be more than that, and at the Sloan School he may have a platform to institutionalize his views. Thurow went into his business, he says, ''not to be an academic economist but somehow, in the naivete of the 1960s, to make the world better.'' He wants to discredit the idea that people are dispassionate actors who obey a silent law of supply and demand. ''We need to change our definition of Homo economicus and make him a little bit more like Homo sapiens,'' he says, arguing that economic decisions are based on more than cold statistics. Other, more human, factors come into play. ''Teamwork, motivation, envy, and cooperation are real words that have real content,'' he says. ''We've taken all that content out of economics. We've got to put it back in and then build microeconomics on top of it.'' He is doing the best he can to spread his message. ''It's hard to miss him on the lecture circuit,'' says Babbitt. ''He's in perpetual motion.'' On that recent trip to Washington, the session before the World Economic Forum lasted but 45 minutes. Afterward Thurow accepted a modest cash fee and a small glass paperweight etched with the forum's logo. He was off to several more such engagements that week, both instructing and, thanks to an airport vandal, learning a small lesson in return: to lock up his radar detector when he parks at Logan overnight.