January 19, 1999
Bennett Harrison, 56, Urban Economist, Dies
By SYLVIA NASAR
Bennett Harrison, a leading radical economist, vocal critic of
United States economic
policy and the co-author of the 1983 book "The De-Industrialization
of America,"
died at home on Sunday of complications from cancer of the esophagus.
He was 56
years old and lived in Brooklyn Heights.
Professor Harrison was professor of urban political economy at the New
School for
Social Research and had just completed the latest of a dozen books
that shared one
common message: the need, in his view, for Washington to play a bigger
role to counter
what he saw as the dark side of the Wall Street economy.
A native of Jersey City, Professor Harrison grew up in an atmosphere
of ethnic tensions;
his father changed the family name from Horowitz to Harrison to get a
job at a radio
station. An ambitious student, he relied on scholarships -- first at
Brandeis University,
then at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Ph.D. in
economics in 1970.
In his heart, though, he never entirely left Jersey City. His academic
career reflected an
interest in the fate of cities and their inhabitants, especially
blacks.
His first book was about economic development in Harlem, and his
latest academic
research, mostly financed by the Ford Foundation, concerned community
development
and job training.
He helped found the Union of Radical Political Economists in the late
1960's but revered
the progressives of the 1930's rather than Marx.
A lively teacher and a popular thesis adviser, he spent most of his
career as a member of
the urban studies and planning department at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
He only gave up his full professorship there to follow his then-wife
to Carnegie Mellon
in Pittsburgh in 1991.
Professor Harrison was very much a public intellectual. For upward of
30 years, he
played this role mostly in a duet with his best friend and frequent
collaborator, Barry
Bluestone, an economist at Northeastern University in Boston. Harrison
devised
economic development plans for a series of left-leaning Democratic
Presidential
contenders, starting in 1972 with Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma. The
plans addressed
segments of the economy where in his view Government could play a
greater role --
public works, environmental clean up and mass transit. His
prescription scarcely
changed in subsequent campaigns and with subsequent candidates. While
he believed
that markets could produce wealth efficiently, he doubted that they
could share it
equitably, and he believed that government somehow could.
A writer with a breezy style and an eye for big ideas, more popular
with readers of
editorials than with members of the economics fraternity, Professor
Harrison was one of
the first to articulate the middle-class malaise, a recurring theme of
the 1980's. In "The
De-Industrialization of America," written with Professor Bluestone
during the deep
recession of 1981-82,, he argued that plant closings and layoffs, not
the strong dollar,
were weakening American manufacturing and the blue-collar communities
that
depended on factories. By urging Washington to follow Tokyo's lead and
adopt a policy
of subsidizing favorite industries like autos and aircraft, he helped
stimulate a national
debate. The New York Times reviewer, an economic adviser to the Carter
Administration, called the book intensely irritating but important.
Five years later, in 1988, Professor Harrison, again in tandem with
his best friend, turned
his attention to inequality, a topic that was to become hot during the
1992 Clinton-Bush
contest. In "The Great U-Turn," Professor Harrison argued that the gap
between high-
and low-wage workers was exploding largely because of shrinking
factory employment
and the collapse of the power of the unions.
While Professor Harrison's analysis was not widely accepted --
economists pretty well
agree that inequality reflects the growing demand for educated workers
by an economy
increasingly dominated by services -- he had once again succeeded in
striking a nerve.
Known for his willingness to engage people of varying views in
friendly debate -- from
the competitiveness guru Michael Porter to Housing and Urban
Development Secretary
Andrew M. Cuomo -- Professor Harrison was not afraid to change his
mind.
While he and Processor Bluestone were routinely introduced as Drs.
Doom and Gloom
in the 1980's, his penultimate book, "Lean and Mean," celebrated the
vitality of large
corporations like I.B.M. and Intel. And his last book, which Professor
Bluestone was
promoting in Europe last week, is a paean to America's resurgent
economy. Still, says
his co-author, a central theme is that only Washington, not the
private sector, can insure
that the wealth is spread around.
Besides economics, Professor Harrison's passions were baseball and
jazz. In college, he
pitched for Brandeis by day and played tenor saxophone in cafes around
Boston by
night. At one point, he dropped out of school for a year to tour jazz
clubs around the
country. He was delighted to get a job offer from the New School in
1996 partly because
it meant he could immerse himself in the New York music scene.
When he learned he was dying, he arranged to donate his instrument, a
1939 Martin, to
the New School's jazz program to pass along to a younger, impecunious
musician.
Professor Harrison is survived by his wife, Joan Fitzgerald, an urban
planner at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, whom he married just days before
his death; his father,
Leo of Springfield, N.J.; his sister, Deborah Kuperman of Highland
Park, N.J., and his
former wife, Maryann Kelly, a sociologist in Washington.
Michael Perelman
