Inspiration to generations of economists
Robert Heilbroner, author of Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers and among the most influential economic historians of the 20th century, has died in New York. He was 85.
Dr Heilbroner, who had suffered for the past three years with Lewy Body disease, a rare Alzheimer's-like illness, died of a stroke last Wednesday, according to his son, David.
A professor at the New School in New York for five decades and author of more than 20 books, Dr Heilbroner remains best known for his first book, Worldly Philosophers, an engrossing account of the lives and contributions of economists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to John Maynard Keynes. Written as his doctoral thesis in 1953, Worldly Philosophers has sold nearly 4m copies - the second best-selling economics text of all time (after Paul Samuelson's Economics)-and remains required reading in the economics departments of virtually every American college. The book is also credited with inspiring the careers of generations of economists.
In his later years, Dr Heilbroner became a critic of the modern economics, cautioning that the focus on mathematics and esoteric models to the exclusion of any societal factors diverged from the great strides made by his Worldly Philosophers. This failure of vision, he warned, threatened to render the field irrelevant. In 1996's The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought, co-authored with Will Milberg, he noted that "the high theorising of the present period [in economics] attains a degree of unreality that can be matched only by medieval scholasticism".
"Bob Heilbroner was a man of very strong and sincere feelings about the world," said Peter Bernstein, economic consultant and author of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. Mr Bernstein attended Harvard with Dr Heilbroner and the two remained lifelong friends since boyhood.
Born in 1919 and raised in Manhattan, Dr Heilbroner attended Harvard in the late 1930s, studying under Worldly Philosopher Joseph Schumpeter and other luminaries at a time of great ferment and upheaval in economics caused by the Great Depression as well as the revolutionary theories of John Maynard Keynes. After graduating, Dr Heilbroner worked for a commodities trading firm before leaving to serve as an intelligence officer in the Pacific in the second world war.
After returning to the business world at the war's end, Dr Heilbroner turned to writing and the study of economics, enrolling at the New School in New York City under the mentorship of Adolph Lowe. It was during this time that Worldly Philosophers was born.
"He was clear about how he wanted to describe, not only the lives and ideas of each man, but the crucial linkages between them," Mr Bernstein wrote in a tribute to his friend in the Summer 2004 edition of Social Research. "The result was this extraordinary, and apparently immortal, history of economic thought."
Dr Heilbroner's other prominent works include A Primer on Government Spending, a influential treatise in favour of President John F. Kennedy's income tax cuts co-authored with Mr Bernstein; and Economics Explained, written with Lester Thurow.
Dr Heilbroner is survived by first wife, Joan, second wife, Shirley, and his two sons, Peter and David.
Dr Heilbroner stopped writing three years ago but he remained a prolific, passionate and controversial voice well into his late 70s. The seventh edition of Worldly Philosophers, published in 1999, included a new final chapter entitled "The End of Worldly Philosophy", which included both a grim view on the current state of economics as well as a hopeful vision for a "reborn worldly philosophy" that incorporated social aspects of capitalism.
"Economics will not, and should not, become a political torch that lights our way into the future," he wrote in the new coda, "but it can and should become the source of an awareness of ways by which a capitalist structure can broaden its motivations, increase its flexibility and develop its social morale."
Steve Schurr