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THE ECONOMIC PHILOSOPHY OF DONALD HARRIS  
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John Cassidy
November 2, 2024
The New Yorker
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_ The Trump campaign has portrayed the Vice-President’s father as a
Marxist. He insists he’s been caricatured. _

, Illustration by Ricardo Tomás; Source photographs from Alamy

 

At the end of July, shortly after Kamala Harris
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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”:

It was a time, every day, for faculty and visitors to get together in
“the Common Room” and engage in or listen to informal and lively
discussions of the most abstract and practical questions in economics
or the news of the day. The highlight for me was watching and
listening closely to Joan Robinson (Post-Keynesian diva) duking it out
with Frank Hahn (Neoclassical divo), in playful but serious jabs and
thrusts.

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
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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.”)

As well as teaching courses in his specialty area, economic
development, Harris taught an undergraduate course called Theory of
Capitalist Development, which emphasized Marxian economics. He also
ran a graduate seminar on political economy, which attracted a devoted
group of graduate students, not all of whom were in the economics
department. Every Wednesday afternoon, a different speaker would
deliver a presentation. Some of the topics were theoretical; many were
historical, such as chattel slavery, bonded labor, and the impact of
colonialism on Indigenous people. After the talk was over, there would
be a lengthy discussion, which often spilled over to a nearby Chinese
restaurant, Chef Chu’s.

I recently spoke with two economists who got their Ph.D.s at Stanford
and attended Harris’s seminar: Chiranjib Sen and Gita Sen, who are
married. “The normal teaching at Stanford was very neoclassical,
very mainstream, and many of us thought it wasn’t realistic,”
Chiranjib Sen, who teaches at B.M.L. Munjal University, outside Delhi,
said. “The approach that Don took was like a breath of fresh air. It
opened our minds to a whole host of historical facts about the
historical evolution of capitalism.” Gita Sen, who became a renowned
expert in the economics of health and gender, and a senior consultant
at the United Nations, recalled that Harris “didn’t suffer loose
generalizations gladly. He would really push people not to B.S. their
way in the name of political economy but really work through what an
argument meant. I personally consider him my most brilliant
teacher.”

At the time, many leftist economists were associated with the antiwar
movement and the Union for Radical Political Economics, which had been
founded in 1968, by students and faculty at the University of
Michigan, Harvard, and Radcliffe. Harris didn’t join the
organization or participate in public protests. “I think he was
always careful to keep his distance from the most fervent radicalism
of the student body,” Duncan Foley, a mathematical economic theorist
and colleague of Harris who took his seminar, and who went on to teach
at Barnard and the New School for many years, told me. Nonetheless,
Harris’s race made him a notable figure on campus. “I had never
had a Black professor before,” Chiranjib Sen recalled. “That was
certainly part of his image and presence. He carried it with great
dignity.” Gita Sen said the fact that Harris was not only Black but
also Jamaican was particularly notable to her and other overseas
students at Stanford, many of whom also hailed from former colonies.
“We felt a sense of community with him,” she noted.

In Harris’s theoretical work, he didn’t focus much on race, but he
did write about it occasionally, and his contributions demonstrated
his willingness to challenge fashionable nostrums. In a 1972 article
in the _Review of Black Political Economy_, he took issue with an
argument that had been put forward by a number of Black leaders,
including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael, and also
some left-leaning academics, that poor Black neighborhoods could be
regarded as “internal colonies,” which were being exploited by
absentee white business owners. Harris acknowledged “similarities of
form between the classic colonial situation and the position of blacks
in American society,” but he argued that the comparison obscured
important “particular historical conditions” and led to erroneous
conclusions about the best way to lift up Black communities. “There
was talk, for instance, about a Black economy and a Black nation all
predicated on the idea of maintaining the segregated status of Black
people and cordoning Black people off from the rest of the system,”
he told me. “Which made no sense to me, because how can you survive
if you don’t have a linkage with the rest of the economy?”

Rather than focussing on particular neighborhoods and their problems,
Harris directed attention to the over-all role that Black people
played in the U.S. economy. After slavery ended, they were excluded
from good jobs and forced to accept low-skill, low-wage positions,
regardless of their talents and work habits. And that was if they had
a job at all: unemployment rates were much higher among Black people
than among white people. The struggle to overcome discrimination and
close the racial income gap, Harris argued, depended on “equalizing
the distribution of employment and unemployment” between white and
Black workers and on “strengthening the position of workers as a
class.” Creating more Black-owned firms—a remedy strongly favored
by proponents of the “internal colonies” theory—wouldn’t have
much impact if these broader issues weren’t addressed.

Most of Harris’s research remained devoted to theoretical questions
investigating how economic value is created and distributed, which had
animated the Cambridge capital controversy. Looking back on that
episode, in an article published in 1980, he wrote that Robinson and
her colleagues had conclusively demonstrated the invalidity of the
claim that profits were determined by productivity. “There is, in
general, no analytical connection which can be drawn between the
technical productivity of factors (capital goods) and the income which
capitalists receive from the total product that would be consistent
with the requirements of the neo-classical theory,” he wrote.

Harris had a point. In 1966, at the height of the dispute, Paul
Samuelson himself conceded that the neoclassical theory of production
was a “parable” that shouldn’t be taken literally. Team
Cambridge, U.K., took Samuelson’s concession as a major victory. In
practical terms, though, the M.I.T. Keynesians came out on top.
Despite the holes that their opponents had picked in their theoretical
framework, most workaday economists continued to rely on it. “It was
very odd,” John Eatwell commented. “It was as if someone proved
that the earth was round, and everybody just went on assuming it was
flat.”

One reason that the neoclassical approach survived was that,
regardless of its theoretical legitimacy, assigning a dollar value to
different forms of capital—from tractors to memory chips—made
conducting empirical research a lot easier. “The Cambridge points
were profound. You can’t aggregate capital,” Joseph Stiglitz, the
Nobel-winning Columbia University economist, told me recently. “But
it was a simplifying assumption that enabled you to do a lot.” In
one much cited paper, Solow, by using the neoclassical tool kit, was
able to estimate and highlight the huge contribution that
technological progress makes in economic growth—a finding that
suggested governments should do all they can to encourage scientific
research and innovation. As Duncan Foley, the New School economist who
knew Harris at Stanford in the seventies, explained to me, Robinson
and her colleagues didn’t have such “a decisive empirical
counterexample.” By the eighties, the theoretical models that they
had put forward were being largely ignored.

Harris, meanwhile, continued to focus on critiquing and finding
replacements for the neoclassical parable. In his 1978 book, which he
dedicated to his two daughters, he examined a broad range of theories
of economic development, from Ricardo and Marx to Sraffa and Robinson
and the neoclassicals. As his title, “Capital Accumulation and
Income Distribution,” indicated, he placed the question of how the
economic pie gets distributed front and center. “In 1978, when Don
published his book, in many mainstream economics texts you simply
couldn’t find the terms ‘inequality’ and
‘distribution,’ ” Foley said. This elision of distributional
questions didn’t merely have theoretical impact, he went on. It had
important, real-world consequences: “All of the models that Don
worked with, whether from a Sraffian or Marxian perspective, had the
property of an antagonistic relationship between labor and capital.
Mainstream economists just weren’t there. They thought that wages
were technologically determined. That was a major reason they had such
difficulty in the nineties and two-thousands in understanding the
impact of neoliberalism and globalization.”

Solow’s neoclassical model of economic growth, for example,
predicted that the shares of over-all income that accrued to labor and
capital would remain constant over the long term. For decades, the
data for the U.S. economy indicated that it did. But, between 2001 and
2010, labor’s share of over-all income fell by about five percentage
points, a major drop in such a short period. Economists are still
debating what caused the dramatic shift, but one seemingly plausible
explanation is that the threat and reality of offshoring jobs to
developing countries gravely undermined the bargaining position of
American workers, making it harder for them to extract wage increases
from their employers. On the flip side, globalization boosted
corporate profits. The distribution of income tilted sharply against
labor, which arguably helped to spark a populist political revolt.
History trumped the neoclassical theory.

Harris didn’t predict these outcomes, and he wasn’t the only one
to query the Solow model. (In the eighties and nineties, some
neoclassical economists created new growth models that were, in
certain respects, more realistic.) But his skepticism of the ruling
orthodoxy was vindicated, and Foley’s point also stands. Harris
emphasized distributional conflict at a time when few orthodox
economists were doing so. In his responses to me, he said that he
included “Income Distribution” in the title of his book to
highlight the fact that many mainstream economists were ignoring it,
and to emphasize the principle “enunciated by Ricardo (and further
developed by Marx) that distribution and use of the surplus are the
key to understanding the structure and motion of the economy.”

During the eighties, Harris moved away from theorizing and started to
engage in policy debates, particularly in Jamaica, which had struggled
economically since gaining its independence from Britain, in 1962.
“I felt called to the task by a strong sense that national
independence and self-government was failing to make much difference
in the livelihood of the Jamaican people,” Harris told me.
Successive Jamaican governments had tried to reduce poverty and income
inequality by expanding redistributive programs and making other
interventions in the economy. But this strategy hadn’t led to
markedly higher living standards for the majority of the population,
and government indebtedness had ballooned. (In 1984, the ratio of
government debt to G.D.P. reached more than two hundred per cent.)
Jamaica entered a series of painful “structural adjustment
programs” under the supervision of the International Monetary Fund
and the World Bank, which involved budget cuts and tax increases.

In Jamaica, and in many other former colonies, some politicians and
left-leaning commentators attributed economic difficulties to the
colonial legacy, which had left newly independent countries with
little capital of their own and still heavily dependent on
foreign-owned firms. Indeed, there was an entire school of leftist
economics known as dependency theory, and some of its followers argued
that developing countries should break with international capitalism
entirely. Harris, in his articles and policy briefs, acknowledged the
historical challenges facing Jamaica’s economy, including a lack of
capital, a weakness in manufacturing, and an overreliance on the
exports of primary products, such as bauxite and sugar. But he placed
some of the blame for the country’s problems on its own shoulders.
“It is also evident that the state itself, through its own actions,
has contributed in many ways to the continued underperformance of the
economy, in particular by creating market distortions, allocative
inefficiencies, avenues for rent-seeking and corruption,” he wrote
in a 2012 article that formed part of a lengthy report on how to
stimulate long-term growth. “Nowhere is such failure of governance
more evident than in the lack of fiscal discipline which accounts for
the large accumulation of public debt that now severely restricts the
options for promoting growth and development in the economy.”

Given the challenges facing Jamaica, Harris believed that a new
economic strategy was needed. For inspiration, he looked to
fast-growing island economies like Singapore, Taiwan, and Mauritius,
which had thriving private sectors and governments that adopted
policies designed to integrate their economies into global capitalism
on more favorable terms. In a series of policy papers, some of which
he co-wrote with others, Harris advocated a program that he believed
would place Jamaica on this path. It included cutting the budget
deficit but also providing financial incentives for private
investment, expanding public infrastructure, and developing
manufacturing industries that had the potential to generate export
growth. “I saw clearly that the over-all objective was to build a
properly functioning capitalist economy, with an entrepreneurial
profit-seeking private sector managing production and investment in
partnership with a state that proactively provides the enabling
environment and political leadership,” Harris told me.

Some of the policies he recommended, such as fiscal retrenchment and
openness to foreign investment, are ones that pro-capitalist,
pro-free-market publications like _The Economist_ have long
advocated. Others, including targeting the development of individual
industries, were inspired by the interventionist Asian Tiger
model—and have recently been adopted by the Biden Administration.
Harris insists that there is no inconsistency between his policy
advice and his prior theoretical work, including his study of Marxian
economics. Although Marx was committed to replacing capitalism with
socialism, he also emphasized the productive power of an economic
system based on private property and the profit motive. In the classic
Marxist theory of history, capitalism had to develop fully before it
became practical to replace it with socialism and, ultimately,
communism. “The basic lesson that I learned from my close reading of
Marx is that it takes capitalism to ‘ripen the productive powers of
social labor’ (his words),” Harris wrote in the autobiographical
article that he shared with me. If this premise is accepted, it
inevitably leads to skepticism about efforts to create a socialist
economy in developing countries, productivity is low, and
technological progress has been stifled.

In my final question for Harris, I asked him about his views on the
appropriate policies for economies where “the productive powers of
social labor” are already highly developed, such as this one. He
said that he didn’t want to be drawn into current political debates,
but he was interested in how the development of artificial
intelligence might accentuate existing social divisions. The U.S., he
said, was in the midst of a “fourth industrial revolution,” which
could create an economy where people with A.I. skills make lots of
money and those lacking them earn very little. The big policy
challenge was in trying to more evenly distribute those gains, and
avoiding group conflicts. But this was “a very difficult question,
and the political discourse doesn’t have the ability to address it
very effectively,” Harris went on. “You get caught up in an
extraordinary degree of gamesmanship and partisanship.” Was that a
political answer? Perhaps. But it also highlighted how the thorny
questions of income distribution and inequality that Harris focussed
on in his theoretical work now play a prominent role in political and
policy debates. Indeed, if the past few decades have demonstrated
anything, it is surely that the term “uneven development”
accurately describes our high-tech, globalized economy. The heterodox
school of economics that Harris is part of certainly didn’t have all
the answers. But it was asking some of the right questions. ♦

Moderator: Also of interest - 

The Rebellious Scientist Who Made Kamala Harris
[[link removed]]
by Benjamin Mueller
The New York Times
October 28, 2024
The presidential candidate’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a
breast cancer researcher whose egalitarian politics often bucked a
patriarchal lab culture.

_JOHN CASSIDY has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995.
He writes a regular column about economics and politics, The
Financial Page [[link removed]].
Over the years, he has also written many longer articles for the
magazine, covering subjects ranging from the economics of John Maynard
Keynes to Karl Marx and globalization to the degrowth movement. He is
the author of two books, “How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic
Calamities
[[link removed]]”
and “Dot.Con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet
Era
[[link removed]].”
He is currently working on a new book about capitalism and its
critics. He grew up in Leeds, West Yorkshire, and has degrees from
Oxford, Columbia, and New York Universities. He lives in Brooklyn with
his family._

_Since its founding, in 1925, THE NEW YORKER has evolved from a
Manhattan-centric “fifteen-cent comic paper”—as its first
editor, Harold Ross, put it—to a multi-platform publication known
worldwide for its in-depth reporting, political and cultural
commentary, fiction, poetry, and humor. The weekly magazine is
complemented by newyorker.com [[link removed]], a daily
source of news and cultural coverage, plus an expansive audio
division, an award-winning film-and-television arm, and a range of
live events featuring people of note. Today, The New
Yorker continues to stand apart for its rigor, fairness, and
excellence, and for its singular mix of stories that surprise,
delight, and inform._

_Subscribe to the New Yorker
[[link removed]]_

* Kamala Harris
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* Donald Harris
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* Economic Policy
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* Jamaica
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* Marxism
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* Cambridge economists
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* Inequality
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