Robert Heilbroner, RIP

Dr. Heilbroner passed away back in January of this year. He was 85 years old. I was unaware of his passing until tonight, when I uncovered his obituary in the NYT. This link to the obit should still work.

Digression: In discovering the article, I first discovered a nifty website, The Annotated New York Times, which identifies the most "blogged" articles appearing in the NYT. What is particularly nice about this site is that it lets you search by topic. For instance, the most blogged economics articles appearing in NYT. If you scroll down this list, you'll find the reference to Heilbroner's obit. End of digression.

The article provides a nice summary of his work and the reception among economists to his work. I was not aware that he was shunned by the brotherhood.

Although popular with students and the general reader, he was regarded by mainstream economists as a popularizer and historian whose insights made no great contribution to the study of the field. He, in turn, saw their reliance on mathematics and computer modeling as narrow in vision and as losing sight of the very purpose of economics - to help improve the well-being of people at work and of the society they work in.

I vividly remember reading Heilbroner's "The Worldly Philosophers" in my parents' attic (which was my room for two years after I graduated from Michigan). I was unhappy with my plight as a not-very-good accountant. Or maybe it was the reality of 9-to-5 work that was the real source of my unhappiness. Either way, I was searching for an alibi to go back to school. But how to afford it and what to study? Heilbroner's book, as I recall, was the tipping point. In the course of two months after reading his book, I'd taken my GRE and applied to 10 PhD programs in economics. Was I conned?

Dr. Heilbroner himself was the first to admit that he was not an economists' economist. He preferred writing to plotting the sale of widgets and calculating the effects of a heat wave on corn futures. And he was interested more in the history of economics and in what he considered its true dynamics than in working within the field itself. He liked to say that his chief accomplishment was in conning millions of students into thinking that the field was both interesting and in tune with their social ideas.

Conned or not, I'm glad I read his book.