Word: macewan
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CAMBRIDGE WILL BE a little lonelier next year for Stephen A. Marglin '59, Harvard's only tenured radical economist. Arthur MacEwan, who has been the other radical economist since Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis were shown the door in 1972, is leaving town. He too has been denied tenure. Even sympathetic liberals, like John Kenneth Galbraith and Wassily Leontief, seem an endangered species. So Marglin will be almost alone in his challenges to mainstream economics and, more than ever, he will seem the Economics Department's bright-boy-gone...
...survived five years with the reputation of someone who once did respectable work, who won tenure in 1967 as a "straight," but who emerged as a closer Marxist shortly after. He wasn't surprised or hurt when James S. Duesenberry, chairman of the Economics Department, implied that Marglin and MacEwan were politicians, not economists, at a debate in April. The 700 spectators in the Science Center winced, but Marglin, who says he and Duesenberry are on "very cordial" terms, thought the debate was unexpectedly mild. He grimly acknowledges that he will be known as "Harvard's only tenured radical economist...
...took his Ph.D. and good intentions to India, a neo-classicist Peace Corps man. At the time, he didn't realize it, but he was joining a Harvard generation of future radical economists in Third World countries Sam Bowles in Neigria. I am Weisskopf in India, and MacEwan in Pakistan. All went abroad as "straights" Marglin recalls that "it was a modern day version the white man's burden...
Marglin followed the lead of Weisskopf. Bowles, Gintis, and MacEwan--non-tenured economists who abandoned the mainstream in the late '60s, and began developing a radical perspective on capitalism. In 1970, he offered a course with Gintis. "Alternatives to Neoclassical Theory." "I shudder when I think of the primitive nature of that course." Marglin says, recalling how eight or nine students came to hear them talk about their work Now, Marglin thinks that his classes are more systematic--"They're real courses," he says...
...There were so many half-truths being uttered by my colleagues that I wanted to say what my recollection of the meeting was." Marglin explains. The rest of the faculty was incensed, and the controversy over radical economists took on a new bitterness. At the next executive meeting--when MacEwan was voted down--Marglin remembers. "I really feared that two people might have heart attacks. There was a total breakdown of their gentlemanly way of doing things...