At the time of his death in 1977, Harry Johnson – by then known to everyone simply as Harry – was not yet 54 years old, yet he left behind a record of scholarship, mentoring, and service worthy of a far longer career. More than three decades later, Harry's name is no longer ubiquitous, but his influence remains evident both in the literature and the ‘practice’ of professional economics. Donald Moggridge's wide-ranging assessment, aptly subtitled A Life in Economics, follows Harry's meteoric rise to prominence from his birth in Toronto in 1923 and his days as a precocious schoolboy through his untimely death in Geneva.
Despite Harry's abbreviated lifetime, he had the opportunity to experience some of the most striking economic and political events of the twentieth century and to take an active role in the scholarly responses to them. These included the Great Depression, the Keynesian revolution (as a student at Cambridge, Harry met Keynes and knew many of the important Cambridge partisans), World War II, the monetarist counter-revolution, and the creation and demise of the Bretton Woods system of pegged exchange rates. Moggridge tracks Harry's intellectual and political development from his days as an idealistic left-leaning young teacher in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, to his final years of commuting between Chicago and Geneva. By then, Harry had grown far more skeptical regarding the motives and likely results of government intervention into economic life. His characteristically acerbic assessment from the early 1970s: ‘The fundamental problem is that, as with all second-best arguments, determination of the conditions under which a second-best policy actually results in an improvement of social welfare requires detailed theoretical and empirical investigation by a first-best economist. Unfortunately policy is generally formulated by fourth-best economists and administered by third-best economists.’
The evolution of Harry's political views has its parallel in the gradual waning of his enthusiasm for Keynesianism and increasing interest in the role of money. This culminated in Harry's contributions to the monetary approach to the balance of payments. Moggridge documents Harry's measured acceptance of an inflation–unemployment tradeoff but also his early recognition that any true tradeoff must depend crucially on expectations, i.e., that what matters is the anticipated real wage rather than the nominal wage. Until the end of his life, Harry saw unemployment as a greater concern than inflation. This view, shared by many economists at the time, underestimated the disruptive effects of inflation on economic planning by both government and the private sector. It is interesting to speculate how the emergence of stagflation as the primary economic issue in the 1980 US presidential election would have affected his thinking.
Although Moggridge might have gathered information from the large number of people still alive who knew Harry, he chose to rely almost exclusively on the written record. His sources include the published writings of Harry and his contemporaries, the many reminiscences and memorials provided by prominent economists in the years following Harry's death, and also the many documents from archives housed in various university libraries and Harry's own unpublished memoirs. Moggridge pays particular attention to resolving inconsistencies in the record; in the introduction, he describes the problems often encountered in dealing with conflicting biographical and autobiographical material.
Moggridge's assiduous combing of the written record may account for the overabundance of ‘facts’ in a large book that bristles with names, places, and footnotes. As an extreme example, a footnote provides the name of the “beautiful political science lecturer” (Harry's words) who accompanied Roger Anderson, a young Keynesian, when he left the University of Toronto to join the staff of the International Monetary Fund. Neither lecturer nor Keynesian is ever mentioned again. Likewise, Moggridge includes the names, never mentioned again, of the economists whose departure from St Francis Xavier University created the faculty vacancy Harry filled in 1943, as well as that of the university's president, whose very ordinary letter of invitation to Harry is also quoted. Indeed, the profusion of unfamiliar names of students, colleagues, friends, neighbors, and public officials made me long for the electronic edition of the book, which would have facilitated my frequent searches for identifying information. The index, which excludes most (but not all) of the footnote mentions of names, is a distinctly second-best aid.
Moggridge sets two major tasks for the book and achieves moderate though uneven success in both. The first is to illuminate the personal side of Harry's life. The result here is to provide too much information of marginal relevance about Harry's early life, perhaps because he had the information at hand. This includes two full pages on the history of child study in Canada. This is provided as background to the career of Harry's mother as a child psychologist, which is traced long into Harry's adult years. Yet Harry's brother Robert seems to be mentioned only in passing and is absent from the index. There is considerable material about the friends of Harry's youth through university days (with many names) but surprisingly little concerning his adult friendships and family life. A photo at the beginning of the book shows Harry and his wife Liz socializing with Zvi Griliches, a Chicago colleague, but only one of the three text references to Griliches (a quotation from a letter characteristically providing Zvi's unsolicited advice) gives any hint of a personal rather than purely professional relationship. I could not help wondering how Liz and the Johnsons' two children regarded Harry's frenetic travels. Perhaps they preferred to keep the intimate details of family life private. In a letter Harry himself writes of finding family life in Chicago ‘pleasant enough on the whole but not very rich’, while Liz later writes to a friend in an ironic tone that ‘it seems I can only see [Harry] these days by driving to an airport or leaving Chicago’.
Moggridge's formidable second task is to illuminate Harry's professional impact. Drawing on his decades of research on Keynes, he gives a highly detailed account of Harry's participation in the debates concerning Keynes and the Keynesians that divided Cambridge economists in the late 1940s. However, younger readers are unlikely to be familiar with the liquidity preference versus loanable funds controversy, which now merits no more than a footnote in mainstream macro textbooks. A couple of sentences early on illuminating the issues would have made the many references to the debate scattered throughout the book more meaningful. In contrast, Moggridge provides an explicit statement of the Rybczynski theorem, a trade-theoretic result that made its way into international trade theory largely through Harry's own writings. Unfortunately, the statement is incomplete, omitting the conditions necessary for the theorem to hold, and there is no explanation of the theorem's significance. More generally, the discussions of Harry's contributions on the micro side – trade and development theory – are more cursory and would likely be difficult for any but a specialist in these areas to follow. Part of the problem is organizational. One example is the discussion of Harry's ideas on the need to explore the interface between the theories of trade and industrial organization, which first appears in Chapter 9. The same theme recurs in Chapter 15, with a sentence that is identical apart from differing typographical errors. Moggridge does a better job with Harry's contributions to trade and development policy, and especially issues relating to foreign direct investment, perhaps because of their prominence in Canadian policy debates.
One interesting theme to which Moggridge often returns is Harry as outsider. Thanks to his intellectual gifts, as a student Harry was often years younger than his contemporaries, a situation compounded by being overweight and extremely shy. Likewise, Harry was a Canadian in class-conscious England, where accent and public school ties were so central to professional success. At monetarist Chicago, Harry arrived with the taint of Keynesian antecedents. Moggridge does not explore whether Harry actually preferred to maintain his outsider role. If so, this could help to explain his decision to divide his time in Chicago first with the London School of Economics and then the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, as well as his insistence on maintaining a punishing schedule of domestic and international travel even after his health began to fail.
In the process of discussing Harry's intellectual development, Moggridge also portrays the settings and institutions that played a role in forming the mature Harry and later provided the most immediate audience for his outsized professional influence. Moggridge evidently draws on his own intimate knowledge of some places and institutions that figure importantly in Harry's career – especially the University of Toronto and Cambridge University, the latter central to Moggridge's major work on John Maynard Keynes. In comparison, the portrayals of the University of Chicago and its Hyde Park environs, and of the Economics Department itself, seem less vivid, being drawn largely from sources relating to conditions and events that preceded Harry's arrival in 1959, other academic departments, and/or the period after Harry's death. Although Moggridge explains that the main emphasis of Harry's teaching at Chicago was trade, the description of his Chicago years lacks even a single mention of the International Economics Workshop. Though known as the Trade Workshop, this – rather than the Money Workshop – was also the main focus of research activity for Harry and other international economists concerned with the balance of payments, exchange rates, and international monetary reform as well as trade. Along with Harry, the faculty presence in the Trade Workshop often included Robert Mundell, Robert Aliber, and Stephen Magee from the Graduate School of Business, as well as a long roster of visitors and of course many graduate students. During Harry's years, Latin American graduate students, often recruited from central banks and finance ministries of their native countries by Arnold Harberger and Larry Sjaastad, accounted for a significant fraction of the graduate student body. In addition to the appropriately named Latin American Workshop, these students were also a notable presence in the Trade Workshop as well as the Money Workshop and others. Most eventually returned to careers in the public sector in Latin America – the ‘Chicago boys’ who brought the gospel of free trade and the monetary approach to economies suffering the effects of import-competing industrialization and hyperinflation.
Moggridge likewise fails to recognize two other aspects of the intellectual life of the Economics Department during Harry's Chicago years that helped to create the unique intellectual atmosphere he prized. One was the daily “tea” where a large contingent of faculty and graduate students gathered for intellectual debate and gossip. The other was the large number of evening parties in faculty homes – Robert Mundell and Arnold Harberger were the most frequent hosts – usually organized to honor a prominent visiting economist. Especially for the younger faculty and graduate students, these evening events, open to anyone who cared to attend, brought about a remarkable degree of democracy and intellectual interchange, even if the interchange relied to an unhealthy degree on free-flowing alcohol. Moggridge quotes David Laidler's recollection that ‘drink could be very much a part of the Chicago economist's way of life…’. Although Harry was a notable drinker, he was by no means unique in this respect.
The concluding final chapter offers a thoughtful evaluation of Harry's contributions to economics and the economics profession, drawing on the many tributes published in the years following his death. As Moggridge observes, ‘His passing was marked as few are in economics.’ One reason is that Harry remained fully immersed in professional activity until the final months of his life. Through his prolific writings, participation in lectures and conferences, and service as mentor, journal editor, and advisor to (among others) universities and departments of economics, Harry was a unique and prized resource for the profession as a whole. Harry was ‘a missionary for good economics. He was prepared to go anywhere to shed light, to find out what others were doing and together add to the development of the discipline…’ Yet in terms of Harry's long-term influence on scholarship, Moggridge documents the rapid decline in citations in each of the major areas of Harry's contributions and offers several possible explanations, though he does not mention that the politics of citations favor the living.
Harry's longtime friend James Tobin, in considering whether Harry would have won a Nobel Prize, characterizes Harry's main achievement to be ‘the massive incremental and synthetic advancement of knowledge’ rather than ‘quantum innovations’. But Harry was unusually reluctant to claim originality even when he was being original. Max Corden's review of Aspects of the Theory of Tariffs criticized Harry for failing to take adequate credit for going well beyond the work of others. Harry replied in a letter that he would ‘rather be known as someone who appreciated his colleagues’ originality than one who stole their ideas and made excessive claims for originality on his own behalf'.
In the ‘advance praise’ that appears on the dust jacket of the book, E. Roy Weintraub, a fellow historian of economics and economists, writes that Moggridge ‘brings Harry Johnson alive for those of us who knew him only through his writings and public lectures’. I would go even farther. For someone who was in turn his student, thesis advisee, coauthor, and colleague at the University of Chicago when Harry was at the pinnacle of his influence, the book provides a vivid reminder of the reasons why Harry was such an important influence on my own life and that of my contemporaries at Chicago and elsewhere. It also provides a wealth of information concerning Harry's personal history, answering some questions that I had really never thought to ask, especially about Harry's early life in Canada. A youth spent mainly in a rural setting sheds new light on Harry's ironic comment in class regarding the agricultural policies of the industrialized countries – that farming is such an attractive way of life we must pay people to put up with it. The book likewise provides many details concerning Harry's complicated dealings with various academic administrators, editors, and publishers. Yet as someone who knew Harry, I am also struck by the inevitable incompleteness of a biography based almost entirely on the written record. Moggridge's short quotations from memorial material bring out only a hint of what is missing.
