Background
Seymour Edwin Harris was born on September 8, 1897 in New York City. He was the son of Augusta Kulick and Henry Harris.
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(Excerpt from International and Interregional Economics 1...)
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Seymour Edwin Harris was born on September 8, 1897 in New York City. He was the son of Augusta Kulick and Henry Harris.
Harris received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard in 1920 and his Ph. D. from Harvard in 1926.
Harris began his teaching career at Princeton as an instructor in 1920. He left that post in 1922 to return to Harvard as an instructor and to pursue graduate work in economics.
Upon receipt of his doctorate, Harvard promoted him to lecturer (1927); he became assistant professor in 1933, and associate professor with tenure in 1936. Allegedly as a result of Harvard's unsavory quota policy, Harris was the only Jewish member of the Harvard's department and had to wait eighteen years before earning tenure, becoming full professor only in 1945. Harris was appointed Lucius N. Littauer professor of political economy on July 1, 1957, a post he held until 1963. Between 1955 and 1959, he chaired Harvard's economics department.
When he retired from Harvard in 1963, he became chair of the economics department at the University of California, San Diego. In the late 1930s along with Alvin Hansen, Paul Samuelson, and John Kenneth Galbraith, Harris popularized Keynesian theory in a nation philosophically distrustful of the federal government and committed to individualism and private enterprise.
He was a prolific author, writing more than fifty books in his career. Not all his works were well received. For instance, one reviewer, professor Robert Lekachman, charged that in Harris's Economics of the Kennedy Years and a Look Ahead (1964), the exposition was unclear, the statistics undigested, and the text ill-organized, but laid these "disfiguring marks" to "hasty composition. " That this explanation was probably correct and that the faults were not endemic may be inferred from the success of Harris's other books.
Harris also served as editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics (1943-1964) and as associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics (1947-1974), and was editor of the volumes Postwar Economic Problems (1943), Saving American Capitalism (1948), Schumpeter, Social Scientist (1951), and many other works.
Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, and presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy sought his advice. Prior to his death, Kennedy had intended to appoint him to the Federal Reserve Board; Johnson did not appoint him to the vacancy, however, which was a major disappointment. In the 1950s, when Japanese exports to the United States began to grow, Harris chaired the New England Governors' Textile Committee, a group that requested legislative help to stem the flood of Japanese textiles to the United States.
Two cases may be cited to support Hyman's contention. First is Harris's New York Times article "The Gap Between Economist and Politician, " in which he professed that the major reason for the gap was "the economists' neglect of the powerful noneconomic factors involved in the making of public policy. " He called for a closing of the gap through the reciprocal recognition of the integrity of each group. In this article he focused on four problem areas: fiscal policy, the dollar problem, the trade expansion program, and agricultural policy. Second, in his Times article "Can We Prosper Without Arms?" Harris proposed a reduction in defense spending to provide a tax cut and direct government investment in health programs, education, and slum clearance, in order to sustain employment.
In 1960, Harris and Nobel Laureate Polykarp Kusch cochaired a committee created by the Democratic party to plan the transition from "a defense to a peace economy in event of world disarmament. "
He died in San Diego, California.
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(Excerpt from International and Interregional Economics 1...)
From his earlier orthodox, even conservative, tendencies Harris was released by Keynes and the New Deal. His work came to reflect a strong commitment to Keynesian economics and policy and to the broad welfare measures of the Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson years.
Harris criticized physicians for their high earnings, claiming they were more interested in income and status than in public service. He did note, however, that their higher incomes reflected longer working hours (sixty hours per week was not uncommon) and the shifting of travel costs to consumers. At the same time, he claimed that hospital services and drugs were overpriced; hospital daily charges had risen at two and a half times the rate of income growth over the period 1948-1963, with most gains going to salaries and wages of professional staffs.
To fund future medical costs he favored private insurance plans, cautioning that cost containment was necessary to protect consumers. In education Harris recommended more realistic financing by the federal and state governments to keep education abreast of inflationary price changes. Further, he suggested that public colleges charge tuition with heavy subvention for students from low-income families through long-term loans (as long as forty years). He wanted to substitute user fees for tax underwriting of public college costs.
Harris, however, was not ideologically bound to the private market approach. In an article in a Catholic journal he endorsed the policy of federal aid to private colleges, including those with religious affiliations. On the other hand, he maintained on constitutional and economic grounds that private primary and secondary schools should not receive public aid.
Quotes from others about the person
Sidney Hyman, reviewing Harris's The Economics of the Political Parties in the New York Times, wrote: "He does not spend his time in theorizing about a perfect economic world where crabs will walk straight, moles will see and elephants will fly. He is a committed political economist, at grips with the problems of the here and the now as they present themselves in the context of concrete cases and controversies. "
Harris married Ruth Black on September 3, 1923; they had no children. After her death, he married Dorothy Marshall on April 27, 1968.