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

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

He produced his Brookings study, Economic Policies Towards Less Developed Countries, in five weeks, but that, he said, was because he had been thinking about it for a long time (Johnson 1967).

At first, writing lectures and putting the words down on paper was quite a struggle. The sentences were long and complicated, the paragraphs crammed with facts in the style of the Canadian historian Harold Innis. I used to argue with him that the sentences should be simpler, shorter, and less condensed. He protested that the thoughts were complex and inter-related, and that the reader had to keep them in his head all at once. I am sure also that he was haunted by the elegant Cambridge lectures of Dennis Robertson.

He came to take great pleasure in his craft with words, honing them like his little wood sculptures, dreaming up pithy wisecracks and aphorisms which he collected and displayed in his office.

He savored the potted wisdom of popular sayings and responded more directly to the humor and pathos of a folk song than to a more sophisticated expression of feeling. His own humor was wry, the tone sardonic, his view of facts unvarnished and unflinching.

The first time I met Harry I was interviewing for the student newspaper customers of a rather grungy but dearly beloved campus restaurant, on its demise. Under the circumstances I was looking for affectionate nostalgia-which I got. But Harry kept insisting, "There was a WORM in my pie."

See what I mean? Unflinching.

Harry was ready to go any place--to the University of Podunk, if they asked him. He was as willing to talk with branch bankers in Brighton as with worthies of the Bank of England. The places he had been and the people he had met formed and informed his economics.

He was not fastidious. He would let a superior article go to an unrecognized journal. When there were complaints about him publishing in obscure journals, he replied that the journal was not obscure in its place of origin-and that it might be the only journal a local economist could get his hands on.

Harry was a preacher-that is clear. There were people who said he wrote the same article again and again. He replied that he always added something new, a new insight or a new application. "You're only as good as your last article," he would say. He believed that it was downright criminal to delay publication of a good idea or a finding and selfishly deprive others of the knowledge or discovery.

I think he felt, with some passion, that everybody in the world should be exposed to the best available economics. Then there might be some chance for a better life for people.

Harry prided himself on being a citizen of the world. He was global before it was chic. If you wanted to get high-faluting about it you could say he was "ahead of his time"-a workaholic before the 1980s and '90s--a human embodiment of the Internet. "Only connect." He was a one-man multinational employment agency and a multicultural resource.

VIII

Corden on Harry's View of the Scientific Enterprise