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

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I joined the Ford Foundation in 1970 as program director for European and International Affairs and soon thereafter the world economy seemed conveniently to crumble. In response to abandonment of the old IMF rules, calls from the developing countries for a New International Economic Order, and other events, Ford established a new priority in my office for the world economy. With generous special funding provided by the trustees, we put together a multifaceted program that included support for research and publication, training, and institutional development of various kinds. After we had been in operation for a couple of years I received a call in New York from Harry suggesting a chat. For some years he had been associated with a small research institute in London called the Trade Policy Research Center (TPRC) that was involved mainly with opposing Britain's entry into the European Economic Community. In the tradition of that other great Canadian-born and Chicago-based international economist Jacob Viner, Ha rry was convinced that customs unions of all kinds were an iniquity, that they stood in the way of global free trade, and that they should be resisted vigorously. We met in London at the TPRC in what I remember as a room not much larger than a phone booth, inhabited occasionally by Harry and regularly by Hugh Corbet, a former journalist who performed the administrative chores. Harry explained that he wished to direct the Center toward a new mission--in essence, the rehabilitation of younger economists in the assistant-associate professor cohort (lecturer-senior lecturer in British terms) who were bright and engaged but had not received the training needed to make contributions on the frontier of modern international economics. He wished to help them select topics, employ the appropriate research techniques, and get published. His request for funding was modest and, most surprisingly to me after several years of dealing with rapacious senior American scholars, he asked for no compensation whatever for himself.

The TPRC under Harry was a model grantee. They moved to larger quarters in London but remained frugal and austere. They involved in their activities the younger economists who were their target, but also a larger community of senior academics, government officials, and business persons who were undoubtedly attracted initially by Harry's considerable reputation. Their ideology was always resolutely free trade but without the shrill intolerance of a Cobden or a Bright. Harry did as he promised, working rather in the background with a generation of younger international economists, and never taking a penny of support for himself that otherwise might go to his young colleagues.

VII

Simpson on How Harry Worked

HOW DID HARRY WORK? A lot of people would answer, "All the time."

Let me show you a viewgraph. It is a caricature drawn by Roger Vaughn, a Chicago graduate student in 1973. It is entitled, "GREAT MOMENTS IN ECONOMICS NO. 5: First graphical depiction of general equilibrium in an n sector model." You see the Harry-headed octopus-the diagrams, the pens, the whisky bottle in the waving tentacles. It would have been true to life to add a knife and a snuff box as well. Harry was ambidextrous.