BY DAVID GIBBONS

For a big-time New York City power couple, Alice and John Tepper Marlin seem suspiciously easy-going, considerate, and friendly. It’s a little hard to reconcile, until you glimpse them puttering around their kitchen and dining room early one weekday morning, politely offering their guest tea or coffee—with or without the cream—and a choice of bran muffin or toast with butter and jelly.

What is it that allows these two veteran movers and shakers to keep it all in perspective and to remain just so darned nice? The key ingredients appear to be 36 years of marriage… an enduring mutual love and respect… a stable family home in the same Chelsea apartment (nice views, by the way) since 1971… world travel… two challenging, rewarding and highly significant careers. The children are full grown—well past their adolescent tumult: daughter Caroline, 30, recently bought her own place in the neighborhood; son Jay, 33, lives on the East End of Long Island, where the family also keeps a summer home.

The Tepper Marlins are, in many respects, old-line Kennedy-era liberals, from blueblood backgrounds, steeped in sixties ideals, with Harvard and Wellesley, Wall Street and City Hall prominent on their impressive resumés. Yet just as they eschew the obstreperous, vein-popping Type A personas you might expect from such a pair of intellectual power brokers, they’ve also avoided becoming relics of a bygone era. Instead, they’ve evolved, adapting their careers to changing trends, responding to the events of the times.

Alice is acknowledged as the architect of corporate social responsibility in America. “She invented the field, which is now conventional wisdom and very hot,” says John, who cheerfully admits to being the second most famous person in the family.

The author of six trade books and innumerable published reports, John has forged a distinguished career as an urban economist. He worked for the federal government for five years in the sixties. In 1972, he founded the Council on Municipal Performance, dedicated to monitoring local governments throughout the U.S., and ran it for 15 years. Beginning in 1992, he was Chief Economist for the New York City Office of the Comptroller, a job that spanned five mayoral administrations over a period of 13 years.

In 2006, John “transitioned” into a consultancy he founded, called CityEconimist; he continues to teach at both NYU’s Stern Business School and Pace University. (Alice was recently named the fifth Citi Distinguished Fellow in Leadership and Ethics at Stern, making them both proud affiliates of the institution.) John has also taken on a few “hobbies,” such as managing the literary estate of his mother, Hilda van Stockum, who authored 22 well-known children’s books, and revising a play he wrote about his mother’s suffragist aunt, Inez Milholland. John’s lively and up-to-date blogs on urban economics, corporate social responsibility and numerous other topics within the realm of his expertise—and the reach of his opinions—can be found on The Huffington Post website; there are also links to them on two websites he maintains: csrnyc.com and cityeconomist.com.

In 1992, John began producing estimates of the New York Gross City Product (equivalent to the national Gross Domestic Product). These were useful in creating impact studies for development proposals, such as the stadium on the site of the Hudson Yards rail depot, and also of events such as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. His estimate of the costs of the 9/11 attacks won widespread acclaim and was instrumental in securing a $20 billion commitment for aid and rebuilding.

When Mayor Rudy Giuliani first proposed a West Side stadium to house his beloved Yankees, his justification was a two-page memo—not exactly the rigorous approach championed by our former chief city economist—blithely asserting that property values would rise, jobs would be created, and taxes would be collected. “There’s a big fallacy there,” says John. “Right now, the Hudson Yards area is not generating taxes. If you put anything there, it will raise values. But this doesn’t give you a basis for deciding what should go there—or for assuming that buildings will be filled right away, or for giving away future taxes to encourage development.”

In 1996, John completed an impact study of the sports industry in the city: “What you find out is that a baseball stadium generates somewhere between 40 and 100 jobs. You can’t even count the baseball players because they live somewhere else. That’s the economic reality. Sports is a big moneymaker in New York. But who makes the money? The NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL [National Basketball Association, National Football League, Major League Baseball, National Hockey League] and the players. The local teams don’t make much money for the city. Stadiums don’t generate jobs. Convention centers are more likely to. A convention center is better than a stadium, but neither one of them is all that great. What does generate revenue is using infrastructure investment to turn around an entire neighborhood, reviving commercial real estate and housing.”

Alice grew up in Rumson, New Jersey, which she terms a “very homogenous, comfortable and idyllically rural suburb.” Early on, she volunteered at the local hospital and also worked with handicapped children from the inner city. She looked to sustain such contributions during college: “I decided I wanted to work on Black Capitalism as a way to break the cycle of poverty,” she recalls. To this end, she chose to study economics, but she hit a snag upon venturing into the job market. The Mesbics—organizations established to provide venture capital for minority-owned businesses—wanted people with real business experience. So, following the advice of a favorite uncle, she went to work on Wall Street. “I was really lucky. I got a job as a security analyst [in 1967] when there were only six women in that job in all of Wall Street. It was really fun and much less pressured than it is now. It was a great education, kind of a substitute for business school.” (In those days, the top business schools did not admit women.)

At Burnham and Company, which later became Drexel Burnham, Alice wrote a highly reputed study, reported in The Wall Street Journal, that attributed an acceleration in the rate of wage increases to the war in Vietnam. Later, at the hedge fund Thomas O’Connell Management, she was assigned to research peace-friendly investments for the portfolio of a synagogue in Newton, Massachusetts. “We got lots of responses for that peace portfolio,” she recalls, “something like 700 inquiries, including not only individuals, but also the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and Yale University. I wanted to expand the concept to civil rights and the environment, but it was too difficult to get information. It was one thing to find out about the military contracts, it was quite another to be able to rate companies on their environmental or employment records.” In fact, companies felt the public had no right to such information and that they had the legal right to block access; revealing it, they argued, would hinder their ability to compete. For journalists and other investigators, it became a freedom-of-information issue.

In 1968, galvanized by such debates, Alice founded the Council on Economic Priorities. The CEP researched and wrote more than 100 studies, reports and books, rating companies from best to worst on a range of social issues, including pollution-control, employment of minorities and women, and occupational safety. The council eventually began to focus more on consumers, encouraging shoppers to “vote with their pocketbooks.”

In the late eighties, the CEP’s “Shopping for a Better World” sold over a million copies and garnered national publicity. A successful sequel, “Students Shopping for a Better World,” focused on categories popular with young people—brand-name casual wear and sports shoes, for example. With the onset of globalization, though, Alice and her colleagues realized their approach in this latest shopping guide was lacking. “Here we were, rating companies on their employment and environmental practices in the United States. What we were capturing was their design, marketing and retailing. But we were totally missing their manufacturing because the factories were almost all in the developing world.” Alice’s response was to create a spin-off called Social Accountability International (SAI). By the time the CEP itself folded in the wake of 9/11, when several of its board members were forced to cancel their pledges due to business losses, Alice had already been 100 percent focused on running SAI for a couple of years.

SAI defines and implements labor practices and other standards for companies in both advanced and developing economies. It builds consensus by working with government labor departments, the United Nations, NGOs, trade unions, corporations and their suppliers, business associations, and factories and farms around the world. SAI trains auditors, managers and workers globally. It set up the Social Accountability Accreditation Agency (SAAS), which accredits auditing organizations worldwide. Those auditors, in turn, certify companies that can demonstrate compliance with social accountability standards. SAI’s most widely adopted standard is called the SA8000; there are now SA8000-certified facilities in 64 counties and nearly 70 different industrial sectors. (For more information, including a full list of certified facilities and a schedule of open enrollment courses, visit the SAI website www.sa-intl.org.)

Recently SAI instituted its first program in New York City, working with garment suppliers to the fashion house Eileen Fisher. “Americans like to think these sweatshop conditions are something that happens over there,” says Alice. “But within 20 or 30 blocks of Chelsea, I can show you plenty of factories that are not paying FICA (Social Security) taxes and don’t provide any health insurance. There are factory floors that are not very well organized or safe; people are expected to work horrendous hours for inadequate wages.”

In addition to Eileen Fisher, Alice mentions Gap, Inc., Chiquita and Tchibo (a major German coffee and clothing retailer) as companies that have achieved 180-degree turnarounds in terms of upping their labor standards. “A decade ago, Gap, Inc. had people outside their headquarters in San Francisco parading around naked saying, ‘We’d rather go nude than wear clothes made in sweatshops.’ Under the CSR leadership of Dan Henkle, Gap moved to being cited everywhere as one of the best companies in this respect.” (While SAI no longer rates companies, as CEP once did, Alice mentions two websites where readers can find such rankings: Alonovo and Responsible Shopper. John, by the way, is considering a new edition of “Shopping for a Better World.”)

Speaking of protests involving garments—or rather, the lack thereof—the Tepper Marlins met as a result of a quintessential sixties version of such an event. A group of women led by Gloria Steinem burned their bras in front of the Playboy offices in order to protest the magazine’s exploitation of women. Playboy’s editors, headed by a Harvard classmate of John’s, Michael Laurence, convened to address the problem. They ran a regular feature about prominent up-and-comers called “On the Scene,” which had never included a story on a woman. So they decided to commission one and their eventual choice of subject was the young founder of the Council on Economic Priorities.

Alice recalls an earnest debate raging within CEP for three days concerning whether a story in Playboy would do more to advance or set back the cause of women. “In the end, we decided that it was better to have a serious story about a woman in Playboy than not. For the interview, I was very careful to wear clothes with long sleeves and a high collar, to look very straight-laced. In the photo that appeared with the article, I was in the Oppenheimer investment company boardroom with an anti-personnel weapon on the table in front of me. It was a very striking image.

“Of course,” she adds, “John claims he never would have been reading Playboy if Michael Laurence hadn’t sent free subscriptions to all his college friends.”

The article mentioned CEP’s rating of paper-industry companies as polluters. John, who at the time was teaching finance at Baruch College, was interested in investigating the respective financial and pollution-control performances of companies. He asked his assistant to set up with a meeting with Alice; their lunch stretched to the early evening. “In six hours, we talked about a lot more than research,” recalls Alice. They began seeing each other regularly and within about six months they were married. Alice adopted John’s surname—Marlin—and he hers—Tepper.

“We really got lucky,” she says, expressing a sentiment echoed by her husband. “We both love and like each other and that’s a good combination. We’ve got a lot of things in common and we’re lucky that both of us wanted and adore children. So that knit us together.” Schedules permitting, they both enjoy their lively dinner table exchanges. “It’s a combination of really substantive conversation and a lot of just juggling schedules,” says Alice.

“It was love at first sight,” says John, leaving no doubt as to who’s the romantic in the family. “I’m amazed we are still in love after 36 years. It’s a great feeling. If you had asked me back then, I would have put very low odds on being able to sustain such a close affection for so long.” Likewise, it’s a fairly safe bet that not too many economists with degrees from Harvard and Oxford met their future wives after seeing a picture of them in Playboy.

Asked to reveal the secrets of a successful marriage in the context of two high-powered careers, John says, “I always knew I wanted to marry someone who had her own career. All our married lives we’ve both been in public service and teaching, which was not always easy financially. But we were always there for each other, not just because we were in love but also because each of us believed in the other’s vision and mission. I grew up with four sisters and a strong, creative mother. When women all stayed at home, it was good for men’s egos, but to my mind, having grown up with a mother who painted and wrote all day and also adored looking after us, it seemed unnatural.”