At the end of July, shortly after Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate for President, The Economist described her father, Donald Harris, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford with whom she reportedly has little contact, as “a combative Marxist.” In September’s Presidential debate, Donald Trump repeated and expanded the charge, calling father and daughter Marxists. “He taught her well,” Trump said. Recently, I asked Donald Harris, who grew up in Jamaica and is now eighty-six years old, how he would describe himself. Harris replied, “Marx himself said, ‘I am not a Marxist.’ He was expressing his objection to the distortion of his ideas by his contemporaries who used his name as a label for their ideas and practices. Speaking for myself and my work, I could say the same today as Marx did back then. But I need not do so. I cannot accept responsibility for, or a need to respond to, the ignorance and illiteracy of those in the media or elsewhere.” Harris, who hasn’t engaged with the press in years, had agreed to answer a series of written questions from me. His reply went on, “All of my work is in the public domain. Anyone who takes the time and trouble to review it will see there the meaning.”
In recent weeks, I read as much of this material as I could—academic papers, policy briefs, articles that appeared in a Jamaican newspaper, a 1978 treatise called “Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution”—and I also spoke with some of Harris’s former colleagues and students. What emerged was a portrait of a deeply serious scholar, and one not easily pigeonholed, although, of course, the Trump campaign has been doing its best to weaponize his academic work and to associate his daughter with it, too, despite their distant relationship. (Harris and Kamala’s late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, divorced in 1972, and Kamala has said that her mother raised her.) Setting aside Presidential politics, Harris is a notable figure in his own right, and during the course of his long career he has taken part in a number of economic debates that continue to have reverberations far outside of academia.
In the nineteen-seventies, Harris became the first tenured Black economist at Stanford. He taught courses in Marxian economics, which was then an active field of research, arguing that it provided a more useful framework for analyzing the long-term dynamics of capitalism—how economies grow and how wealth gets distributed—than the theories promulgated in standard textbooks and courses. Harris, in his 1978 book, which surveyed a number of different approaches to economic development, wrote that the Marxian system, though incomplete in some essentials, “remains today as a powerful basis on which to construct a theory of growth of the capitalist economy appropriate to modern conditions.” Nevertheless, much of his own theoretical work emerged from a distinct but related intellectual tradition, the post-Keynesian school, which was originally associated with some left-leaning British followers of John Maynard Keynes. Harris extended the post-Keynesian approach to developing economies, and he argued that a key feature of capitalism as an economic system was “uneven development,” both within and across countries.
In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, he was a combatant in a lengthy and heated transatlantic dispute that pitted two bastions of Keynesian scholarship—Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts—against each other, raising fundamental questions about how the pie gets divided in capitalist economies. And, from the eighties onward, he espoused an economic-growth strategy for his native Jamaica that placed him on the side of supporters of globalization and distanced him from leftists who rejected international capitalism and favored a revolutionary leap to socialism. “The history after Marx’s time shows the damage that can come from the alternatives chosen and implemented in the name of Marx,” Harris wrote in an autobiographical article that he completed recently, a copy of which he forwarded to me. “In my view, the biggest historical blunder and misdirection of the 20th century came from the idea of building a ‘socialist/communist’ society in an economically backward country, which is a gross inversion of Marx’s ideas. The people who lived (and died) under the iron fist of their leaders in those countries suffered the consequences of those errors.”
In short, Harris is a more interesting and idiosyncratic figure than he has been portrayed in some quarters. His economic views were shaped by his upbringing in colonial-era Jamaica. He was born in 1938, in Orange Hill, a small village near the island’s northern coast, where his family owned a farm. In an article published in 2018, he said that his interest in economics and politics was sparked by watching the daily routine of his grandmother, known as Miss Chrishy, who owned a dry-goods store. Harris’s parents made him attend Sunday school and learn the catechism. He was a diligent student in high school and secured a place at the University College of the West Indies, which had been established shortly after the Second World War on a plot of land outside the capital city, Kingston. There, Harris earned a general bachelor’s degree, with majors in economics, English, and Latin. He also gained more exposure to the outside world.
Although Britain had acceded to limited self-government in Jamaica during the war, the island was still ruled, ultimately, from London, as it had been since 1655. The world was changing, though. At the start of 1959, while Harris was in college, a revolution in neighboring Cuba overthrew Fulgencio Batista, the U.S.-supported dictator. Harris, in his autobiographical essay, recounted how developments in Cuba dominated the media in Jamaica, which had a similar heritage: colonialism, sugar plantations, and slavery. “Words like Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, Imperialism were being tossed around, in political speeches that I heard on campus, and in the local and international news,” Harris wrote. “But to me, they were just words. I had no structured meaning or reasoning about them. About capitalism, I knew the little that I got from reading the economics textbooks.” And in his mind, these books tended to obscure as much as enlighten.
Even after Harris moved to Berkeley, in 1961, to enroll in the doctoral program in economics, he was frustrated by the theories he encountered in many of his textbooks, which presented a harmonious picture of the economy: market forces allocated resources efficiently, and conflicts between workers and employers were glossed over. This approach, which was known as neoclassical economics, struck Harris as an unrealistic parable that didn’t reflect the real world. While doing some reading in the university library, he came across a book from the nineteen-thirties that represented a rival intellectual tradition: “Political Economy and Capitalism,” a collection of essays by Maurice Dobb, a Marxist economic historian at Cambridge University. “It offered a perspective on ‘Political Economy’ very different from that being presented in the standard courses, which I found quite revealing and became eager to follow up,” Harris told me. Whereas neoclassical economics presented itself as a universally applicable science based on certain fundamental axioms, Dobb emphasized history, class conflict, and imperialism.
Harris was already familiar with the works of two more prominent Cambridge economists: Keynes and Joan Robinson, both of whom were greatly influenced by the Great Depression. In Keynes’s 1936 magnum opus, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” he challenged the old orthodoxy that capitalist economies had self-healing properties and that the proper role of government was simply to stay out of the way. Recessionary periods, he argued, required fiscal-stimulus policies—an insight that helped create the intellectual foundation for a postwar era of managed capitalism in Western countries.
Robinson took things a step further; she believed that the Great Depression had completely discredited free-market economics, which needed to be replaced wholesale. (When she was an assistant lecturer at Cambridge, in 1933, she published a pathbreaking book about how supposedly competitive markets come to be dominated by large firms that have the power to set prices above competitive levels and wages below them.) During the postwar decades, she and her colleagues tried to extend Keynes’s basic insight—that market forces alone couldn’t be relied on to stabilize the economy—to theorizing about longer-term issues like growth and inequality. Rather than relying on neoclassical theories, they invented new ones.
Harris’s budding interest in Cambridge economics was deepened when Amartya Sen, who is now one of the best known economists in the world, but was then a young teaching fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, arrived at Berkeley as a visiting professor. Harris, after learning that Sen had obtained his doctorate under Dobb’s supervision, asked him to join the examination committee for his own thesis, an investigation of inflation, capital accumulation, and growth in the Jamaican economy. Sen talked to Harris about Cambridge economics and introduced him to a book by Piero Sraffa, an enigmatic Italian who had been a fellow at the school’s Trinity College since the nineteen-thirties, after he fled Mussolini’s regime.
Sraffa’s book, which was published in 1960, represented an ambitious effort to move beyond neoclassical theorizing: it used modern mathematical techniques to resurrect and extend the theories of David Ricardo, an early-nineteenth-century Englishman whose writings on rents and wages influenced many economists of his era, including Marx. Ricardo divided society into three rivalrous classes—landlords, capitalists, and workers—and showed how the landlords were able to take the lion’s share of the economic surplus by virtue of owning, and charging rent on, a scarce and valuable resource: land. After reading Sraffa’s book, and also a lengthy introduction to the collected works of Ricardo written by Sraffa and Dobb, “I knew I had to go to Cambridge,” Harris recalled to me.
In 1966, the same year Harris obtained his Ph.D. at Berkeley, and two years after the birth of his eldest daughter, Kamala, he spent some time as a visiting fellow in the ancient university town on the banks of the River Cam. He visited the elderly Dobb at his home, outside Cambridge, and had tea and crumpets with Robinson at a café overlooking the river, which he described as “a special treat.” Robinson and some of her colleagues were then engaged in the so-called Cambridge capital controversy, which pitted them against a number of prominent neoclassical economists, most notably Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, who both taught at M.I.T. Although both sides were nominally Keynesians—meaning they adhered to the activist policy doctrines of Keynes, who had died in 1946—a good deal of animosity and bitterness had developed between them.
On the surface, the Cambridge capital controversy was a recondite dispute about the nature of physical capital—factory buildings, machine tools, computers, and so on—and whether it is possible, for theoretical and empirical purposes, to aggregate these parts into a single whole and attach a dollar figure to them. Team Cambridge, U.S., said that it was. Team Cambridge, U.K., said that it wasn’t. The battles were waged in academic papers packed with Greek symbols, and, reading them at a distance of more than half a century, it’s difficult to understand the heat that they generated.
But lurking beneath the algebra were deep methodological and ideological differences. In the neoclassical model of the economy that Samuelson, Solow, and many other M.I.T.-style Keynesians relied on, wages are determined by the productivity of workers, and profits reflect the productivity of capital: highly productive workers get paid more than moderately productive workers, and new investments that boost productivity generate a higher rate of return. Indeed, these relationships can be captured in a mathematical equation, known as a “production function.” In this framework, workers and capitalists, far from being antagonistic, are both set on an equal footing as “factors of production.” Market forces insure that they are both rewarded on the basis of their productivity, which is ultimately determined by the state of technology. Exploitation and the class struggle have nothing to do with it. The Cambridge, U.K., Keynesians balked at this theory. Robinson, in particular, had come to regard the neoclassical approach as a thinly veiled rationalization for the institutions and inequities of capitalism. Outraged by the members of Team M.I.T. appropriating the Keynesian moniker, she would start to refer to them as “Bastard Keynesians.”
To an ambitious and left-leaning young scholar like Harris, the clash of ideas was alluring. He described “tea time” with the economics faculty as a “thrilling experience”:
Although Harris’s economic views were increasingly aligned with Robinson and her colleagues, the thing that struck him most about these exchanges, he told me, was the intellectual give-and-take. “Critical thinking about ideas was a cultural norm, embraced and welcomed by all sides in any issue up for debate,” he said. This environment, he went on, “was in sharp contrast to my experience of reactions (closed-mindedness, condescension, even hostility) of some of my colleagues, both conservative and liberal, in America.”
The U.K. Keynesians took to their visitor, too. John Eatwell, a veteran British economist who was then a first-year faculty member at Cambridge, recalled that Harris was inquisitive, technically adept, and up to date on the latest literature on both sides of the Atlantic. “I think that one of his advantages was that he was much better at understanding the economic sensitivities in America than the Cambridge people were,” Eatwell told me. “They tended to read themselves and Samuelson and Solow, but that was it.” Harris was quickly welcomed “onto the Cambridge economics team,” Eatwell recalled. “He became one of the most analytically precise writers within that body of work.”
After Harris returned to the United States, he focussed on applying the post-Keynesian approach—developed primarily on the model of advanced countries like the United States and Britain—to developing regions, such as the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean. In his papers, he highlighted certain structural features of developing economies, such as a large agricultural sector and a shortage of funds to import advanced machinery, which, he believed, could hold back growth. Such features didn’t show up in simple neoclassical models, and Harris’s goal was to move beyond those models.
In 1968, Harris moved to a tenured post at University of Wisconsin. He also travelled abroad, visiting Cambridge again, and, in 1970, obtaining a Ford Foundation fellowship to the Delhi School of Economics, the leading economics department in India. By this stage, the Cambridge capital controversy was winding down—with both sides claiming victory—but economics was still riled by contentious debates over issues like inflation, labor unions, and poverty in the developing world. During one of his visits to Cambridge, Harris stayed with Eatwell, who recounted, “Don will debate anything. It was long discussions into the night.” Harris also reconnected with Joan Robinson, who was nearing retirement from teaching, but who remained a prominent voice in public debates. (She was an outspoken critic of the Cold War, the war in Vietnam, and the free-market economic doctrines associated with Milton Friedman, of the University of Chicago.) Harris “got along well with Joan, but he was not an acolyte,” Eatwell said. “Don always wanted to question things, and to tease out the alternatives.”
In 1972, Harris accepted an offer to teach at Stanford, which asked him to help set up a new field in the graduate program called Alternative Approaches to Economic Analysis. Stanford wasn’t exactly Berkeley, but the political tumult of the era had reached the campus in Palo Alto. There were antiwar protests, and some students were demanding a broadening of the economics syllabus to include radical approaches to the subject. The Stanford Daily reported the news of Harris being offered a full professorship on its front page under the headline “Marxist Offered Economics Post.” (It should be noted that, during the seventies, interest in Marx’s theories wasn’t confined to the far left. Paul Samuelson introduced a section on Marx in his popular textbook, writing,“It is a scandal that, until recently, even majors in economics were taught nothing of Karl Marx except he was an unsound fellow.”)
