In the final chapter of his book Roy Harrod, Esteban Pérez Caldentey provides a table comparing Harrod’s JSTOR citation count with those of some of his famous contemporaries—John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, John Hicks, Joan Robinson inter alia. Harrod is in the middle to low side for the group of eleven economists in the table. Still, most of us would envy Harrod’s overall score. Harrod’s citations peak in the 1960s. And while citations to Harrod continue, a quick look at JSTOR shows that 63% of his citations are either to the Harrod-Domar model, a construction that, as Pérez Caldentey rightly notes, is not really Harrod’s, or to Harrod-neutral technical progress, which is not essentially important in Harrod’s own works and is mainly a convenient name for something that would have found a name, even if Harrod had never considered the concept.
Harrod appears in the Palgrave Macmillan series Great Thinkers in Economics. Some historians would reject the idea that our business is to assign evaluations such as “greatness” to historical figures. I am rather flexible on that point; and, since the series “is designed to illuminate the economics of some of the great historical and contemporary economists by exploring the interaction between their lives and work, and the events surrounding them,” it seems legitimate to ask whether Harrod really was a great economist (see note facing the cover page of the volume). After reading Pérez Caldentey’s book, I have come to think of Harrod as rather like a novelist, such as Walter Scott, who was wildly popular in his own day and who, therefore, must be of interest to anyone who studies his times, but whose works mainly gather dust and lack much enduring interest to modern readers.
A note on the back of the book refers to it as “the first major intellectual biography of Harrod.” As biography, it falls flat. Most of the details of Harrod’s life are sequestered in an opening chapter, “The Life, Times, and Contributions of Roy Harrod.” Should that not be the subtitle to the whole volume and not a single chapter? The material in that chapter is presented in a rather perfunctory manner and reads rather like a CV turned into a narrative. While it mentions some of his social and political attitudes and some of the trials of his life (difficult marriage), it fails to provide any real insights into Harrod as a man or what made him tick. None of his color or animal spirits manages to shine through.
Except for the final chapter, which mixes a summary of the previous chapters with some assessments from recent authors, the book divides its chapters partly topically and partly chronologically. Like the opening chapter, these chapters—more intellectual than personal—do not really work as biography. Rather, they are careful and—let me be clear—insightful readings of Harrod’s principal works. Pérez Caldentey is thorough, though perhaps too thorough, and lucid in recounting the details of these works. He is judicious with respect to Harrod’s arguments on their own terms and in assessing their merits and those of his interlocutors. But even here, we get only a minimal notion of Harrod’s place in his historical context or of what moved him. If one wants to know what Harrod wrote, Pérez Caldentey’s book will be an indispensable reference. If one wants to know what was the engine of his intellectual life or what was his significance for the history and development of economics, it is rather thin.
The six substantive chapters of the book address the trade cycle, dynamics, Harrod’s work in relation to his own accounts of the history of economics, international economics, and his thinking on the reform of international financial institutions. These chapters are all highly informative and generally well written. I do find the format, in which each chapter is constructed like a stand-alone journal article, with an abstract and references at the end of the chapter rather than the end of the book, to be off-putting and inconvenient. One chapter does not build smoothly on another, which reinforces the feeling that this is more of a reference work than a biography.
Having myself written on Harrod’s dynamics and the way that later economists systematically misunderstood and misrepresented them, I was interested in Pérez Caldentey’s treatment of the topic—particularly of his 1939 “Essay in Dynamic Theory,” taking it as a litmus test for the quality and reliability of the book. On that score, Pérez Caldentey does well. His readings of Harrod are fair and perceptive. He clearly grasps that the so-called Harrod-Domar model has virtually nothing to do with Harrod’s actual work and that Harrod had an interesting and important insight into the problem of economic dynamics. He ably shows that Harrod’s analysis of the instability of dynamic equilibrium addresses a completely different issue from the “knife-edge” that Robert Solow misleadingly attributed to him. And he explains clearly that Harrod did not think in terms of production functions—with or without fixed coefficients. Unlike Domar or Solow, Harrod’s analysis is not about long-term growth, and it is not even a “model” in the sense that term is used in current economics. Pérez Caldentey is also good at documenting Harrod’s own complicity in the confusions surrounding his analysis—his failure to effectively correct the record against the widespread Harrod-Domar interpretation and his failure to adequately develop and clarify his own original insights.
In all, this is a prodigious work of scholarship—highly valuable for anyone with a specialized interest in Roy Harrod. Although it is hardly a riveting read for the broader community of historians of economics, it should be consulted by anyone who wants to understand Harrod’s writings.
