Raymond Vernon

Background

Ethnicity: Vernon was one of four children of Russian Jewish immigrants whose last name was Visotsky.

Raymond Vernon was born on September 1, 1913, in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Hyman and Lillian (Sonnenberg) Vernon.

Education

Vernon earned a Bachelor of Arts cum laude from the College of the City of New York in 1933 and a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1941. He also received an honorary degree of Master of Arts from Harvard University in 1959.

Career

During the mid-1930s to 1940s Vernon worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission in a variety of positions. He was part of the Marshall Plan committee that helped design Europe’s resurgence following the second World War. He later joined the U.S. Department of State and was actively involved in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), helping to bring Japan into the agreement. In addition, Vernon also helped organize trade with Soviet-bloc countries. From 1946 to 1948, he was a lecturer at American University in Washington. From 1954 to 1955, he was a lecturer at Princeton University in New Jersey, and planning and control director at Hawley and Hoops, Inc. From 1954 to 1956, Vernon was responsible for overseeing new products, one of which was peanut M & M’s. From 1955 to 1956, Vernon was also a lecturer at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

From 1959 to 1978, Vernon was a professor of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, and then from 1962 to 1965, he was a director at Harvard Development Advisory Service in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1973 to 1978, Vernon became a director at Center for International Affairs in Cleveland, Ohio, and from 1979 to 1981, he was an adjunct professor at Fletcher School Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Massachusetts.

During his Harvard tenure Vernon served at various times as the Herbert F. Johnson Professor of International Business Management and the Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs. He also directed the Development Advisory Service and the Center for International Affairs. He began studying multinational corporations in the mid-1960s and wrote several books on the topic including Sovereignty at Bay: The Multinational Spread of U.S. Enterprise and The Economic and Political Consequences of Multinational Enterprise: An Anthology. Other books include Storm over the Multinationals: The Real Issues and Exploring the Global Economy: Emerging Issues in Trade and Investment. Vernon edited numerous books and contributed writings to more than forty-five others.

Although actively involved in the government or scholarly research for the bulk of his career, Vernon did complete a two-year stint working for Forrest Mars Sr., owner of the Mars candy company.

Achievements

• Raymond Vernon is known for the development of The Product Life Cycle Theory. That is is an economic theory, that was developed in response to the failure of the Heckscher-Ohlin model to explain the observed pattern of international trade. Raymond Vernon also published a model that described internationalization patterns of organizations. He looked at how U.S. companies developed into multinational corporations (MNCs) at a time when these firms dominated global trade, and per capita income in the U.S. was, by far, the highest of all the developed countries.
  
  Raymond Vernon played a central role in the post-world war development of the IMF and GATT organization. He became a professor at Harvard Business School from 1959 to 1981 and continued his career at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
  
  Vernon had an impact on the world in many ways, from studying globalization before the term existed to putting the peanut in M & M candies. He was considered one of the most influential scholars in his field. Vernon also became known in the candy business as “the man who put the crunch in M&M’s.”
  
  The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management instituted the Raymond Vernon Prize in 1984 in honor of Vernon, who was the founder editor of their journal, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and renamed it the Raymond Vernon Memorial Award following his death.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Exploring the Global Economy

    (This wide-ranging collection of previously published arti...)

    1985
  • Beyond Globalism: Remaking American Foreign Economic Policy

    (Vernon, the acknowledged authority in international econo...)

    1988
  • Two Hungry Giants: The United States and Japan in the Quest for Oil and Ores

    (This is the first book that explores the relationship bet...)

    1983
  • Iron Triangles and Revolving Doors: Cases in U.S. Foreign Economic Policymaking

    (In a rapidly shrinking world, governments everywhere find...)

    1991
  • Manager in the International Economy

    (The authors bridge the gap between strategies of business...)

    1972
  • Sovereignty at Bay: The Multinational Spread of U.S. Enterprises

    (Examines the economic power and influence of multinationa...)

    1971
  • The Regulation of Stock Exchange Members 1941
  • Anatomy of a Metropolis: The changing distribution of people and jobs within the New York metropolitan region 1959
  • The Myth and Reality of Our Urban Problems 1966
  • Hegemony of International Business 1945-1970: Sovereignty At Bay 2000
  • Storm over the Multinationals: the Real Issues 1979
  • Public policy and private enterprise in Mexico 1964
  • Technology Factor in International Trade 1970
  • The Promise of Privatization: A Challenge for U.S. Policy 1988
  • Defense and Dependence in a Global Economy 1992
  • Oil Crisis 1976
  • Repeat the Instructions 1969

Views

Vernon believed that state-owned corporations could not successfully compete against privately owned multinational companies and his research helped fuel the surge in privatization that took place in the 1980s.

Membership

Vernon was a fellow of the American Academy Arts and Sciences and of the Academy of International Business. He also was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the United States/United Nations Association and Phi Beta Kappa.

Personality

Vernon was an excellent rower; he competed for many years in crew in the Head of the Charles Regatta and in his 80s broke the world record in CRASH-B Sprints. He was a member of the Cambridge Boat Club for 40 years, and he and his wife, Josephine, donated a weathervane to the club.

Quotes from others about the person

• ''Ray Vernon was the father of globalization long before people used that term. His work has had a phenomenal effect on several generations of thinking about how the global economy works.'' - Daniel Yergin, an author and business consultant.

Connections

On August 9, 1935, Vernon married Josephine Stone. The couple had two children: Heidi and Susan Patricia.

Father:

Hyman Vernon

Mother:

Lillian (Sonnenberg) Vernon

Spouse:

Josephine Stone

Daughter:

Heidi Vernon

Daughter:

Susan Patricia Vernon