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Harry G. Johnson : Scholar, Mentor, Editor, and Relentless World Traveler - 1923-1977
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, July, 2001 by Max Corden, James S. Duesenberry, Craufurd D. Goodwin, J. Allan Hynes, Richard G. Lipsey, Gideon Rosenbluth, Paul A. Samuelson, Elizabeth Johnson Simpson, LAURENCE S. Moss
LAURENCE S. Moss [*]
I
Samuelson on Harry, the Full Achiever
IN THE BRITISH ACADEMY OBITUARY OF Harry, James Tobin called ours the Age of Johnson. That was a bit of a stretch, but admissible in an eulogy where, as Dr. S. Johnson observed, one is not under strict oath. Undeniably our Johnson did penetrate into every nook and corner of post-1940 mainstream economics. He was certainly among the most prolific of our clan. Indeed, although he died at age 54, the intensity at which he lived added up to at least two normal lifetimes.
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Harry seemed a driven man--self-driven. Articles bubbled out of him like songs from Franz Schubert and varied melodies from Mozart. He would travel 3,000 miles to attend a meeting, whittle away while the program droned on, polish off a nightcap quart of scotch, and then on the plane trip back home compose a paper dealing with some aspect of the subjects discussed. Before the word processor amplified scholars' capacity for good or ill, Harry's little portable typed out print-ready copy.
Johnson surfaced in big-time science at Harvard following the war's end. He was born on a Toronto street where (I believe) Lone Tarshis, Harold Somers, A. F. W. Plumptre, and a number of other eminent Canadian economists had lived. Like Jacob Viner in an earlier Montreal generation, Harry had a distinguished physician brother. During the war itself Harry did have a brief sojourn in the Other Cambridge. Unaccountably, he did not at Harvard stand out remarkably in comparison with the several hundred post-war graduate students in economics. At MIT, three miles away, I would hear tales about Bob Solow, Jim Tobin, Carl Kaysen, and Tom Schelling. However, when Harry called on me at my office (along with a forgotten second face), I was obtuse enough to regard him as just another competent student. However, Sidney Alexander alerted me to Harry's unusual versatility and speed. Needing a grader to handle examination books, Alexander hired the first to volunteer, namely H. J. Later that day the books came back expertly graded and ranked. Since the normal expected time was three blue books per hour, Sidney was suspicious of a slovenly job. Checking, he reported to me, "They were optimally evaluated. Clearly we deal here with an extraordinary talent." Fellow editors were later to learn the same lesson.
John Chipman was surprised to find out how prolific Pareto had been: his words of publication exceeded those of Keynes and Ricardo put together. When I mentioned this to the late, erudite Alexander Gerschenkron, I was told that Eli Heckscher, Bertil Ohlin, and Luigi Einaudi put Pareto to shame. Like him they wrote often for newspapers and general magazines; a book merely listing Einaudi's bibliography made a volume thicker than Marshall's Principles. Johnson, by contrast, concentrated on learned journal publishing. Certainly he was aiming for a lifetime total of more than 1,000 scientific articles. Given a normal life span of the Bible's three score and ten, he would surely have reached that goal. It was said that at Johnson's death he had 18 articles in proof. I wager that there wasn't a dud in the whole lot. The classical scholar and poet A. E. Housman was asked by a colleague about an item he had not included in his collected papers: "Did you think it not good?" Housman answered, "I thought it good. But no t good enough for me." I doubt that Harry let the wet rag of doubt kill off many of his plane-ride progeny. Friedrich Lutz said of a super-productive Harvard professional contemporary, "That man Seymour Harris can't hold his ink." A similar case was the mathematician Richard Bellman: he wrote important innovative analyses, but he may have written too much-so much that readers were not always sure whether they had or had not already read the Bellman result that arrived in the morning mail. (The same can never be said about the mathematician Paul Erdos, who died recently in his 80s, having authored or co-authored highly respected mathematical articles in excess of 4,000. Erdos was without wife or family and lived only to conjecture and prove mathematical theorems. On his own, in the forest or city, he could never have survived a full week or met a payroll at either end.)
Harry burned the candle at both ends. Alas, that does not give you two candles. Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler, their contemporaries report, were both over-busy persons; while they talked to you they repeatedly checked their watches; both died young. Mendelssohn, like Pascal, died before 40, each already an old man. Harry chose to teach a full stint at Chicago, while teaching a full stint at the LSE; some periods he could tuck between them a teaching assignment Down Under, in Australia or Hong Kong or Singapore. At no place were students and colleagues cheated or stinted. Perhaps his arteries paid the price, although even had he eschewed tobacco and barley-corn and cholesterol, always his meter was running.
I recall an early encounter during my 1948 Guggenheim Fellowship year. At Will and Hilda Baumol's London lodgings, Frank Hahn introduced Harry, who had come from Cambridge to address an informal seminar of lively LSE prodigies. At no time was Harry without a cigarette; before one burned out he left it glued to his lip while lighting another; a third of the time he kept two going. Later when he swore off smoking, he took up whittling wood. He was good at everything he tried, whittling being no exception. I remember a masterpiece of three little monkeys, ducking their heads and covering their ears. The legend on the piece read: "Don't hurt me, Milton!"
