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him, which blossomed into a modern trade theory; as a reformer in teaching at the major centres of learning like the London School of Economics (LSE), Chicago and Manchester Universities, not to speak of the universities in his home country, Canada, and most of all as one who assiduously worked to create the right attitudes and congenial intellectual atmosphere in developing countries like India and Pakistan by publishing some of his important articles on trade and monetary policy in their non-refereed journals.

Harry Johnson, after his fi rst degree in Canada, moved to Cambridge again for the undergraduate Economics Tripos, as the latter had a halo and lustre as a great university of the iconic Keynes. He was, of course, one of the most brilliant students with top honours in the Tripos along with I G Patel. Maurice Dobb, his tutor in Jesus College, had a very high opinion about his talent but he qualified it, curiously enough, that Johnson “certainly has alpha touches; but while he is sure-footed and very competent, he may possibly lack that touch of originality necessary for a consistently first-class performance”. Harry Johnson’s view on Dobb were equally ambiguous. “Dobb is a good supervisor”, he said “knowledgeable but not a good lecturer”. Johnson’s admiration for Dennis Robertson was unqualified. “Robertson’s lectures” he opined “were brilliant but one had to know enough economics in order to understand them”. However, Joan Robinson aroused mixed reactions. As he told one of his former professors in Toronto, “she lectures in a monologue and has a rambling way, which confuses her English students, apart from being polemical and political”. He later slightly modified his view of her, calling her lectures “exciting”. Once Robinson started her lecture in a rather flat monotone, “well it is very diffi cult these days to lecture on economic theory because now we have both socialist countries and capitalist countries!” Harry Johnson thought “Gosh, what a wonderful new idea!”

Harry Johnson was made a member of the Political Economy Club in 1945 when it was revived by Robertson, on the basis of his brilliance in his Tripos and discussion of varied topics. On one memorable occasion in 1945 when Keynes presented his paper for discussion at the Club, “The

Economic & Political Weekly

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december 19, 2009

Balance of Payments of the United States” which was a harbinger of the birth of the Bretton Woods twins, Harry Johnson was invited to open the discussion. He did it “through a rather lame argument to the effect that given the availability of lots of farm labour in the United States, it would take some time before the pressure of d emand for industrial products would force up the level of wages because labour would be drawn from the farms”. According to Harry Johnson, Keynes was very kind when he picked up his point and “made something of it...one of the secrets of his charm was that he would go out of his way to make something fl attering out of what a student had said...On the other hand, when a faculty member got up...and that time Joan Robinson stood up and attempted to argue with him – he simply cut their heads off!”

The election to the fellowship at King’s College put Johnson clearly in the Keynesian camp, which until then revolved around Kahn, Kaldor, and Joan Robinson. Paradoxically enough, Johnson’s exit from orthodox Cambridge Keynesianism took place in Cambridge itself and not in Manchester, where he was a professor, as David Laidler (1984) claimed. The fi rst echoes of his dissent from Keynesianism were found in five lectures that he delivered in Karachi 1956 on “Monetary Theory and Keynesian Economics” published only later in 1962. His parting of ways with Keynes’ economics began with his feelings about its weaknesses as a theory of prices and they got entrenched in his psyche after reading A J Brown’s The Great Infl ation and Milton Friedman’s The Quantity Theory of Money. Johnson’s other writings on the varied branches of economic discipline make one wonder whether he was, despite his protestations to the contrary, ever an orthodox Keynesian.

Dissatisfied with Cambridge

Though Johnson thrived at Cambridge, he was not enamoured of it even at the start which was corroborated by his conversation with Thomas Balogh on his fi rst arrival in Cambridge. He felt that “...the war left a big gap, in terms of both people and research...Richard Stone’s Department of Applied Economics has been the only active element in economic research”. This

vol xliv no 51

view was reinforced over time when he preferred to accept a chair in economics in Manchester University. He wrote in his autobiographical notes that he “became increasingly dissatisfied with Cambridge – my colleagues seemed stuck in dead monetary economic controversies, or immersed in growth models with little relevance to the real world and was getting intellectual stimulation from his students at Cambridge and American visitors”.

What was even more disconcerting to Harry Johnson was the degeneration of economics as taught in Oxbridge in particular and the UK in general into a “political subject” because of the “practice of applying political criteria to the assessment of scientific ability and achievement”. Perhaps the unexpected outcome of this, according to Harry Johnson was to enhance the position of mathematical economics in UK because it is a way of appearing to do economics without actually doing anything controversial or committing oneself to believe in what one is doing. Cambridge turned to mathematical economics when concentration on real economics became blocked by Cambridge politics. His sarcasm was epitomised in the statement, “Mathematical economics was compatible with avoiding either right-wing or left-wing political commitment”. Perhaps this was a blessing as ideology however annoying it might have been, inadvertently could result in mathematisation of economics and its scientific rigour. His odyssey to Cambridge thus testifies “to the process of it coming to the end of a long period of glory with a thread running from Marshall through Pigou and Keynes” as noted by Bhagwati (1977).

With a slow fade out of Cambridge, the star of Harvard was rising and it was natural that Harry Johnson was drawn to it. But the Harvard of 1947 when he joined it had its own blues. It was reeking with anti-Semitic phobia which barred economists like Paul Samuelson from its faculty. Some non-entities like H H Burnbank, the chair in economics, was “a negligible quantity as a scholar and economist”. But it was in a “change mode”, with Joseph Schumpeter as a star performer who was joined later by G Haberler, A Hansen, and W Leontief, who opened the economics department to fresh winds of theoretical developments

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elsewhere, particularly in continental Europe. But Schumpeter’s infl uence was limited as he was intellectually isolated in view of his lack of interest in senior colleagues and the atmosphere vitiated after Schumpeter had pronounced that the second world war should be “avoided at all costs because it would destroy the European economy and culture”. But Schumpeter along with Leontief and Haberler and, to some extent, Edward Chamberlain facilitated “green shoots” of economic ideas at Harvard.

Harry Johnson was most excited and stimulated intellectually by Schumpeter. As he wrote in his memoirs, “Schumpeter was the only truly culturally and intellectually interesting man there though he had a wide streak of charlatanism; and other professors and students had considerable contempt for him, whether for the one reason or the other, one could not be sure.” His other influential teachers were Haberler, Hansen, Leontief and John Williams. During his apprenticeship, as a research student at Harvard, he made his debut as economist by writing his fi rst theoretical articles “An Error in Ricardo’s Exposition of His Theory of Rent”, and “Demand for Commodities Is Not Demand for Labour”. Both published in top journals like Quarterly Journal of Economics (1948) and Economic Journal (1949).

However, Johnson did not write his dissertation for a PhD degree, though he completed his course work and passed his comprehensive. But by some quirk of fate, the Harvard PhD regulations changed in 1957 which permitted an award of PhD on the basis of articles in refereed journals and books. He leapt at the opportunity, by assembling his thematically connected articles on trade and growth and submitted them for the degree. His oral examination, a necessary part of the process, was conducted by James Duesenbery, Paul Samuelson and Franco Modigliani. The only other instance of obtaining a PhD without submitting a dissertation was Jagdish Bhagwati’s. When he was offered tenure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the lack of a PhD was overcome by taking his few published seminal articles on international trade as a substitute for a dissertation. By a strange coincidence, the exception to the standard procedures for awarding PhD degrees in America by two famous universities were made in regard to two intellectual soulmates – teacher and student and in the same specialised field of trade theory.

This raises, on a general plane, an important question whether a dissertation is at all necessary for awarding a PhD degree. From the countless PhD degrees, only a few have contributed to the advancement of knowledge at least in economics as is evident from rare publication of articles based on PhD dissertations in the reputed academic journals. This was precisely the point Arthur Smithies of Harvard had raised a few years ago and had suggested that a doctorate could be awarded if a student submits two published papers in leading refereed journals.

Though Harry Johnson cherished highly his tenure as a don at King’s College, his discomfort about Cambridge’s intellectual

Aim:

Eligibility:

Modalities:

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milieu was getting worse. In the fi eld of knowledge, he tended to be nihilistic which was attributed by Richard Lipsey to his Cambridge experience after 1949, accentuated by a fierce debate on welfare economics, provoked by the challenging thesis on welfare economics of Jan de Graff. It reached a tipping point in 1953-54 because of the treatment Milton Friedman received from the grandees of Cambridge, when he visited there. As Johnson recorded in his letter to Friedman, “I shall recall with shame the deliberate rudeness with which you were cold-shouldered by my colleagues at Cambridge during your visit here”. His meeting with Friedman was, “(a) traumatic intellectual experience for myself and the only two other Cambridge dons who were willing to expose themselves to the moral risks involved and ultimately brought me as a pilgrim to Chicago”. Johnson happened to be invited around this time by the University of Manchester, being impressed by his performance in lectures on “Economic Expansion and International Trade”. But his stint at Manchester University was all too brief though challenging and intellectually productive. He was still harbouring for an invitation from Chicago which materialised in 1959. He joined Chicago, a luminous centre of economics with a long line of illustrious economists like Tjalling Koopmans, Frank Knight, Lloyd Metzler and the ever dynamic Milton Friedman.

Souring of Relationship

Though his relationship with Friedman was cordial initially when Harry Johnson was drifting away from the Keynesian way of thinking, it began to sour later. The incident which almost destroyed his relationship was accidental and had nothing to do with personalities. Harry Johnson and Jagdish Bhagwati published a joint paper in Economic Journal, March issue of 1961 on “Notes on Some Controversies in the Theory of International Trade”. The last section of this paper was wholly Johnson’s contribution. In a footnote to that section, he dealt with Friedman’s assertion and Egon Sohmen’s alleged proof that “equilibrium is necessarily enclosed by stable equilibrium points in an unstable foreign exchange markets”. Harry Johnson referred, in this context, to Sohmen’s contribution

Economic & Political Weekly

with derogation to the effect that “it illustrates the extent to which non-sequitur-and ignoratio elenchi can be accepted as valid argument if the conclusion purportedly reached is of suffi cient propaganda value”. This infuriated Friedman who felt that it amounted to “bullying by Harry of a lesser economist (Sohmen)” and he wrote to the Economic Journal that “he told Johnson that he ought to be ashamed of himself and that he owes you a public apology.” This unsavoury episode rankled with Johnson. Besides, he was not entirely at home at Chicago University, according to Edward Shills, a professor there because of the “rough and tumble of discussions in the economic department and he was thinking of throwing up his post there to go to John Hopkins”. He was also chagrined by the flippant and off the cuff bloviations by the Chicago faculty members about the Keynesians. He gave vent to his feelings in his address to the Chicago Graduate Student Political Economy Club in 1960. “At least in some quarters in Chicago, a Keynesian is a weak and spine-less creature, who blindly follows the master along the path of error, refusing to modify or develop the system of thought Keynes started or to test it in any way, or to consider the allegedly conclusive evidence thrust before his nose by Chicago economists”.

Harry Johnson, though generally identified as a monetarist in Friedman’s image and in Chicago tradition, was not on the same wavelength with Friedman in regard to the main contours of monetary theory. He was less impressed with Friedman’s work. He thought that Friedman’s signature thesis The Optimum Quantity of Money had a “misleading title, since the analysis referred to theoretical side issues suggested by past controversies and its intrinsic concern for quantification of potential welfare gains which is provided only fragmentarily and inconclusively; the need for the rather embarrassing ‘schizophrenic note’ could have been avoided by presenting the argument more frankly as a logical exercise.” He criticised Friedman explicitly before the British audience in his “The Keynesian Revolution and the Monetarist Counterrevolution”, and Hove report.

Harry Johnson was offered a chair by the LSE which meant commuting between Chicago and London, which he did with

vol xliv no 51

gusto and enormous intellectual energy. He was instrumental in a radical reform in the 1960s, of the teaching methods and economics curricula at the London School. He felt a Msc programme had a questionable utility except as “a topping-up of fourth-year arrangement for British undergraduates” and a PhD degree “operated as elsewhere in Britain on the standard ‘master-apprentice’ model in which the aspiring candidate attached himself/herself to a supervisor willing to take on the topic proposed by the student. There was also the ambiguous position of the PhD in the British job market in the 1960s”, meaning thereby that “it was a sop for second rate foreigners”. As Bernard Corry whom Johnson quoted put it “If you could not get a job in less time than it took to complete a British PhD, there is something wrong with you, and once you had a job, why bother with the PhD?” This situation was in sharp contrast to the American postgraduate education, which led to a spate of research in major disciplines across all universities, leaving the British system of education in some disarray which continues even to this day.

Journal Editor

As a teacher and research guide Harry Johnson is well known but as a journal editor he is not sufficiently known. He was a journal editor par excellence; he did not care where the articles came from – famous economists, friends or just new entrants in economic research fi eld. He first came, in 1949 on the advisory board of editors of the Review of Economic Studies (RES). He made it his principal motto unlike many other editors, to know what was going on in the profession and to use that knowledge to nurture aspiring authors and improve their output. Harry Johnson lived up to his mission as exemplified by his treatment of the works of Kelwin Lancaster, Richard Lipsey and Tad Rybczynski. When Johnson was told by Lipsey in common room conversation that his and Kelwin’s ideas were being dressed up in different guises, he immediately asked them to “publish them immediately”. Then Lancatser and Lipsey wrote the famous article, “General Theory of the Second Best”, improving it with an exhaustive survey of literature as suggested by Harry Johnson

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which then was published in the RES. This article has come to be now one of the classic papers on the subject. Again, Lipsey recalled that Johnson cajoled him to write down his ideas on trade diversion and welfare and to rush it for publication even when his own article on the same topic with a similar theoretic frame was already submitted to the RES. As luck would have it, both Lipsey’s (in Economica) and Johnson’s articles appeared almost simultaneously. The latter’s generosity and his intrinsic instinct to promote new talent are rarely matched in a fi ercely competitive academia where “Publish or Perish” is the only mantra to establish priority in ideas. His mentorship of the young economists was again displayed in the case of Rybczynski, when he told Johnson about the result he had obtained in course of working on his thesis at LSE. Harry Johnson was excited and pressured him to publish it; this is the famous “Rybczynski Theorem”. Incidentally, this was the only paper Rybczynski ever published, giving him “one of the highest ratios of fame to published work”. Harry Johnson was aware that publication of articles in refereed journals is often an elaborate and a protracted process and for that reason, he stressed the importance of seminars, particularly for the youngsters, where new ideas could be aired and discussed before they were published.

Selfl ess Scholar

In a profession where new ideas are not easy to emerge and a jealousy of possession runs amok, Harry Johnson stood out as a selfless scholar, ever willing to celebrate new economists with a flair for originality. Max Corden who acquired notoriety as a muck-raker and nit-picker, though himself a reputable trade theorist, wrote in his review of Harry Johnson’s “Aspects of the Theory of Tariffs” in the EJ, 1972 that he gives an impression that “the main ideas of his ‘Optimal Trade Intervention’ article come from the Bhagwati-Ramaswami paper but anybody comparing the two papers must find Johnson’s paper a great advance.” Harry Johnson far from being fl attered by this unsolicited compliment swiftly r etorted that

I do in all probability overdo my no-originality, while recognising other people’s work, but it is likely that I learned it from Dennis Roberson. But new ideas are scarce in our business; whereas we are all trained how to give formal expression to one when we see it. And I would rather be known as someone who appreciated his colleagues’ originality than as one who stole their ideas and made excessive claims for originality on his behalf.

He further added:

…the two central propositions in his paper which Corden referred to, were derived from discussions with Jagdish Bhagwati and particularly from his brilliant joint article with V K Ramaswami – to these two authors belongs the credit for reducing a mass of ad hoc arguments concerning tariffs to a simple application of second best welfare theory – and that his paper elaborates more fully on the infant industry argument and adds two propositions about non-economic arguments for protection.

Arvind Panagariya (2006), prominent among young trade theorists fi nally h ammered the nails into the coffi n of C ordon’s slander campaign. He, drawing on the main tenet of scientifi c discovery as defined by D Patinkin, showed that B hagwati-Ramaswami’s contribution gives “a central message” unlike even James Meade on this particular issue.

There are numerous stories about Harry Johnson’s impeccable integrity, fairness and objectivity in assessing the merits of articles in journals. He was invited to write a review article by the EJ on James Meade’s “The Balance of Payments”. He did it but his review provoked the ire of the big wigs in the British academes like Roy Harrod and Lionel Robbins. Austin Robinson who was then was one of the editors of the EJ, came under heavy pressure to withdraw the article on Meade, “I am having a great deal of diffi culty over your review of James Meade”, Robinson wrote to Harry Johnson, “Harrod has reacted violently and pleads with me to withdraw the review, allow the book itself to be reviewed by someone else”. Robinson, however, suggested a few changes, mainly cosmetic to assuage the feelings of Meade’s friends and the article was eventually published. When this was brought to the notice of Richard Stone, Harry Johnson’s well wisher and admirer, he said,

your main point goes too deep for tampering to be of any use. Meade who is a good friend of mine, is a liberal, rational and i ncorruptible above everything. It is a sad fact of life that such people are often ideologically b iased, though it is the last thing in the world they would want to be.

Such were the vanities and verities of the venerable social scientists!

Harry Johnson was not happy about how EJ, one of the top-most refereed journals in economics was managed editorially. When Keynes and Harrod were at its helm, “refereeing, extremely rare and idiosyncratic under Keynes and still rare under Harrod, only started to become a norm

Call for Papers

Conference and Ph.D Workshop on “Frontier Issues in Technology, Development and Environment”

(Annual Conference of IASSI hosted by MSE) (Venue: Madras School of Economics, March 19-21, 2010)

The Madras School of Economics (MSE) is hosting a three day conference of Indian Association of Social Science Institutions (IASSI) on “Frontier Issues in Technology, Development and Environment”. The conference is also supported by the Forum for Global Knowledge Sharing (Knowledge Forum). The conference will have two components:

All the participants (including the Ph.D. students) will spend three days at MSE. Papers are welcome on each one of the themes namely, technology, development and environment, and also interdisciplinary papers cutting across the themes.

Paper titles and manuscripts should be sent by email to Professor N S Siddharthan

Last date for submission of title and abstract – January 15, 2010 Last date for the receipt of Papers – February 9, 2010

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