International Trade and Economic Growth (Collected Works of Harry Johnson): Studies in Pure Theory (Collected Works of Harry G. Johnson Book 1)
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The studies collected in this volume embody the results...)
The studies collected in this volume embody the results of research conducted in the mid 1950s into various theoretical problems in international economics. They fall into three groups – comparative cost theory, trade and growth and balance of payments theory. This volume consolidates the work of previous theorists and applies mathematically-based logical analysis to theoretical problems of economic policy.
Harry Gordon Johnson was a Canadian economist who studied topics such as international trade and international finance. He worked as Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, London School of Economics, and Graduate Institute of International Studies.
Background
Johnson was born on May 26, 1923, in Toronto, Canada, the elder son of two children of Henry Herbert Johnson, newspaperman and later secretary of the Liberal Party of Ontario, and his wife, Frances Lily Muat, lecturer in child psychology at the Institute of Child Study of the University of Toronto.
Education
Johnson was educated at the University of Toronto schools and then obtained scholarships to the University of Toronto, where he studied law and economics. After World War II, he attended Cambridge University while still in the army, receiving a second bachelor's degree in 1946. His college professor at this time was the noted Marxist economist Maurice Dobb. Johnson pursued graduate studies back in Toronto in 1947, obtained an M. A. from Harvard in 1948, and returned to Cambridge in 1951. After his second stint at Cambridge, Johnson capped off his educational career by acquiring a Ph. D. at Harvard in 1958. The latter degrees were attained en passant, as it were, because over the same years, Johnson was a lecturer at Cambridge (1949-1956) and a professor in economic theory at the University of Manchester, England (1956-1959).
As a student, Johnson never failed to impress his professors, and fellow students found him unfailingly helpful and accommodating.
Career
After a year of teaching at St. Francis Xavier University at Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Johnson went overseas with the Canadian infantry in World War II. In 1959, Johnson took a professorship at the University of Chicago, which remained his academic home until his death. After 1966, Johnson served each year for one term at the London School of Economics and Political Science and two quarters at the University of Chicago.
Johnson's main contribution to the field of economic theory was in the analysis of the effects of relative changes in a country's domestic money supply on its international balance of payments. He is perhaps best known, however, for his astringent attacks on the "Keynesians, " whose advocacy of interventionist governmental fiscal policies were in ascendancy on college campuses in the 1950's and 1960's. Johnson's attacks helped dampen the influence on economics of the more radical wing of the Keynesians (largely the Cambridge University group dominated by Joan Robinson). Johnson's approach to economics was eclectic, but an abiding influence on him was Professor Dennis H. Robertson of the London School of Economics and Cambridge University. As is made clear in the book Johnson cowrote with his wife, The Shadow of Keynes (1978), Johnson was upset by the shabby treatment of Robertson by the dominant Keynesian clique at Cambridge in the 1950's.
Johnson was a visiting professor at many universities, and he delivered papers at innumerable conferences. He never severed his ties to Canada, and he appeared often at the conventions of Canadian social scientists. He served on various Canadian commissions on the Canadian economy, and he was the mainstay on the research staff of the (Porter) Royal Canadian Committee on Banking and Finance in 1962. In his last years, Johnson divided his time teaching at the University of Chicago and the Graduate School of International Relations at Geneva. Johnson was the author of some 500 articles and 19 books and was the editor of 24 additional texts. He served at various times as editor of Economica, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of International Economics, and the Journal of Political Economy. Among his noteworthy publications were the books International Trade and Economic Growth (1958), Aspects of the Theory of Tariffs (1971), and On Economics and Society (1975). Noted as a rather heavy drinker, he suffered a mild stroke in 1975 and died two years later in Geneva.
Despite his anti-Keynesian stance, Johnson never completely adopted the Chicago school, which holds that the level of the nominal national income is largely determined by the supply of money and that discretionary monetary and fiscal policies cause instability in the functioning of the economy. Nor did Johnson take a purely noninterventionist approach to the societal problems of affluent economies.
Robertson's period model of macroeconomics was distinguished from the Keynesian national income model because Robertson clearly implied a necessary change in the money aggregate as the economy moved from one level to another.
Johnson's study of monetary effects on international trade and the balance of payments led him to the insight that under a regime of fixed exchange rates, inflation was an international phenomenon. He believed, in other words, that an excess supply of money in one major economy would spill over to its trading partners and the price level would rise in both countries. Thus, in agreement with Milton Friedman of the Chicago School, Johnson became a strong advocate of freely floating exchange rates as the one method of adjusting trade and the balance of payments among a group of trading countries operating under different monetary and fiscal regimes.
Johnson was an advocate of an international division of labor and of open economies operating in free markets. Early on, he exposed the fallacies and the structural imbalances resulting from the forced industrialization policies for development advocated by Raúl Prebisch and his followers. Nevertheless, Johnson was sympathetic to programs of the welfare state designed to ease the hardships suffered by individuals bearing the brunt of the transition costs of structural shifts in the economy, and he advocated some fail-safe assistance for those whose social or physical handicaps prevented them from fully participating in the economy. Johnson was also concerned about the uneven investment in "human capital" in a private economy, which means that educational resources were not distributed optimally between the rich and poor.
Membership
Johnson was president of the Canadian Political Science Association and chairman of the Association of University Teachers of Economics.
Connections
In 1948 Johnson married Elizabeth Scott Serson, an editor and writer who served for many years as the chief editor at the University of Chicago Press. The couple had two children.