Memoriam to Harry G. Johnson: An Economist's Economist

Professor Harry G. Johnson, the economist, died on May 8 at the age of 53. His death rated a longish obituary in the New York Times, but went unremarked on the evening news shows. For Professor Johnson was not a public figure. He never deigned to wallow in the swamps of political economy. Rather, he was the quintessential economic scientist. Even his closest friends were hard put to discover his ideological bent, for Harry Johnson professed none. More than that, he escaped all the neat taxonomies: in manifold books and professional‐journal articles, he attacked Keynes where he felt the great Lord was wrong; he criticized the Neoclassicists for their myopia; and he remained distrustful of what he viewed as the overly simplistic analytics proffered by Milton Friedman, his senior colleague at the University of Chicago.