Geoff Harcourt

Geoffrey (Geoff) Colin Harcourt (27 June 1931, Melbourne)^[1] is an Australian academic economist who studied at the University of Melbourne and then at the King's College, Cambridge.

Biography

After studying economics at the University of Melbourne he moved to the University of Cambridge where he received his doctorate. In 1958 he moved to the University of Adelaide as a lecturer and was appointed to a chair in Economics at Adelaide in 1967. (He was a University Lecturer at Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall 1964-96, on leave without pay from Adelaide). He was a University Lecturer (1982–90) and Reader (1990–98) in the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge and a Fellow and College Lecturer in Economics, Jesus College, Cambridge 1982-1998 and was President of Jesus College Cambridge, 1988–89 and 1990-92.

He has made major contributions to the understanding of the ideas of Keynes, Joan Robinson and other Cambridge economists. He has also made important contributions in his own right to Post Keynesian and post Kaleckian theory. A review article^[2] of one his volumes of ‘Selected Essays’ argues that (i) insofar as he has written on capital theory, it has been as an innovator and not as a mere raconteur, and (ii) that he has developed his own suite of post-Keynesian models – this is evident for example in his 1965 paper “A two-sector model of the distribution of income and the level of employment in the short-run” which is reprinted in The Social Science Imperialists: Selected Essays of G.C. Harcourt.

Major publications

• Joan Robinson. London: Palgrave Macmillan (Great Thinkers in Economics Series), 2009 (with Prue Kerr).
• The Structure of Post-Keynesian Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• 50 Years a Keynesian and Other Essays. London: Palgrave, 2001.
• Selected Essays on Economic Policy, London: Palgrave, 2001
• A 'Second Edition' of The General Theory (2 vols). London: Routledge, 1997 (edited with Peter Riach).
• Capitalism, Socialism and Post-Keynesianism. Selected Essays of G.C. Harcourt. Cheltenham, Glos: Edward Elgar, 1995.
• Post-Keynesian Essays in Biography: Portraits of Twentieth Century Political Economists. Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1993.
• The Social Science Imperialists: Selected Essays. London: Routledge, 1982.
• Some Cambridge Controversies in the Theory of Capital. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
• Readings in the Concept and Measurement of Income. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
• Economic Activity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.

Honours

• In 1971 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
• In 1996 he was made a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Society of Australia.
• In 2003 he was elected to an Academician of the Academy of the Social Sciences in the UK.
• In 2004 he was made a Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society (USA).
• In 2004 he was made an Honorary Member of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought.
• In 2011 he received the Veblen-Commons Award from the Association for Evolutionary Economics

References

• P. Arestis, G. Palma and M. Sawyer, 'Introduction' in P. Arestis (et al.), Capital Controversy, Post Keynesian Economics and the History of Economic Thought: Essays in Honour of Geoff Harcourt vol 1, Routledge, London, 1997.
• Geoffrey C Harcourt page at the New School’s history of economic thought website [2]
• Citation for the award of an Honorary Degree at the University of Melbourne [3]
• His ‘profile’ at the The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia may be found here [4]

External links

• Interviews with Harcourt (where he talks about his life, the Cambridge controversies and other aspects of economic theory) may be found on YouTube here and here.