Revisiting the work of Donald Harris, father of Kamala
In a video clip that has gone viral recently, Kamala Harris quotes her mother asking her whether she thought she had just fallen out of a coconut tree. The probable Democratic nominee for president breaks into a laugh at the turn of phrase before explaining, somewhat philosophically, the message of the story: “you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” For Ms Harris some of that context is esoteric economic theory. Her father, Donald, is an 85-year-old, Jamaican-born economist, formerly a professor at Stanford University.
As part of a tradition of heterodox economists, Mr Harris is tenacious and prosecutorial, with a terrier-like grip on the blind spots and misguided assumptions of the mainstream (as well as the foibles of his daughter, whom he publicly admonished for stereotyping Jamaicans when she admitted to smoking marijuana). He is a clear writer. There are few compound nouns or sentences that run for paragraphs. Yet he is still a Marxist and his writings are sprinkled with obscurantist theorising. Republicans who have mocked Ms Harris for word-salad speeches will find precedent in her father’s writing.
Mr Harris’s work shares some of the economic concerns of the Biden administration, in which Ms Harris is vice-president. His book, “Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution”, published in 1978 and dedicated to Kamala and her sister, examines the pitfalls of relying on profit-seeking capitalists to direct an economy. The focus is on the connection between inequality and growth. Seeking to not only understand why some countries are rich and others poor but also why parts of all economies are backward, a pattern he calls “uneven development”, Mr Harris rejected the work of Robert Solow, the father of mainstream growth theory, and aligned himself with post-Keynesians such as Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa.
The two camps sparred often. In the 1950s Robinson’s critique of Solow’s growth model led to what became known as “the Cambridge Capital Controversy”, owing to the fact it took place between neo-Keynesian economists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, such as Solow, and post-Keynesians in Cambridge, England. The latter alleged that their American peers improperly conceptualised capital. Aggregating the capital stock, the diverse mix of equipment an economy relies on, in terms of money involved circular logic: the return on capital was required to calculate its volume, which was then required to calculate its return. The American economists conceded the point but kept using their models. “If God had meant there to be more than two factors of production, he would have made it easier for us to draw three-dimensional diagrams,” Solow quipped.
Mr Harris did not move on. In his 1978 book he developed a model of growth without an aggregate capital stock. Rather than the smooth “production function” of Solow, in which the rate of saving and population growth determines capital per worker, Mr Harris instead proposed that firms must choose from a “book of blueprints”, which need different capital goods. Capitalists will compete to ensure the rate of profit is consistent across different industries, picking a blueprint based on the level of wages and profits in the economy. Unlike in Solow’s model, each part of the economy does not use the maximum amount of capital per worker. There is no “steady state” path of growth, but multiple equilibria dependent on the level of wages and profits. Later he would suggest that constantly evolving technology inevitably leads to persistent unemployment.
In his diagnosis of capitalism as inherently insecure and, if left to its own devices, insufficient to improve living standards, there is an echo of themes in both American party’s platforms; namely, the public investment and industrial policy in Bidenomics, which is intended to juice growth for the “middle class”, and the more interventionist aspects of Donald Trump’s economic nationalism. Americans across the political spectrum now seem to agree that the unfettered free market is not the route to widespread prosperity.
Trying completely to reconcile Mr Harris’s work with the mainstream would bowdlerise it, though, as it is more unashamedly Marxist than anything in modern American politics. He is concerned with exploitation, the value form and the diminishing rate of profit. In one paper he dismissed the idea of America’s black population as analogous to those living under colonial rule, arguing that the problem was capitalism rather than dominance by a foreign power. There is no reason why black workers would be better off under black capitalists than white ones, he wrote.
Today few politicians are keen to cite Robinson or Sraffa as intellectual influences. Mr Harris, for his part, retired from academia in 1998 to focus on policy work, including advising the Jamaican government. For all his earlier radicalism, he has recommended fiscal discipline and crime reduction, as well as export-led growth and industrial strategy. In the end, however, perhaps his greatest economic legacy will be his daughter. ■
For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.