John R. Meyer

John R. Meyer (1927 – October 20, 2009) was an American economist. He is credited with creating the field of transportation economics and was one of the pioneers of cliometrics.^[1]

Life

Meyer attended Pacific University 1945–1946, after which he served in the United States Naval Reserve 1945–1948. He received his B.A. from the University of Washington in 1950 and his Ph.D (David A. Wells Prize) from Harvard University in 1955. He was a Junior Fellow from 1953–1955. He married Lee Stowell (1928–2003) December 17, 1949 and they had three children, Leslie Karen, Ann Elizabeth and Robert Conrad.

Meyer was a professor at Harvard University's Department of Economics from 1955 to 1968, at Yale's Department of Economics from 1968 to 1973, and at the Harvard Business School from 1973 to 1983. He served and as the president of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) from 1967 to 1977, before the NBER was moved to Cambridge, MA. Meyer was a consultant to the National Transportation Policy Study Commission from 1977 to 1979. He served as vice chairman and board member of Union Pacific Railroad. He died on October 20, 2009 after a long period of battling with Parkinson's disease.^[2] At the time of his death he was the James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation Emeritus at Harvard Kennedy School.

Research

Meyer was open to interdisciplinary collaboration in his research. He combined engineering with economics. In order to understand the cost structure in the transportation industry he had to work together with engineers.^[1]

Transportation economics

Meyer and three co-authors (Merton Peck, John Stenason and Charles Zwick) published The Economics of Competition in the Transportation Industries in 1959. This book conducted a thorough analysis of costs and demand which enabled the authors to study what the railroad industry might look like if it were better governed. Regulation of railroads had implicitly given incentivizes to passenger over freight trains. This made railroads less efficient and also less profitable because intercity rail’s great comparative advantage was in moving goods over long distances. Meyer's second great influential book on transportation economics was The Urban Transportation Problem, co-authored with John Kain and Martin Wohl (an engineer). That book described the process of American suburbanization and the rapid switch from public transportation to cars.

Cliometrics

Meyer was a pioneer of New Economic History, also called Cliometrics.

In 1958 and fellow Harvard professor Alfred H. Conrad published "The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South", published in the Journal of Political Economy. Using rigorous statistics, the authors concluded that the view that slavery would have disappeared without the American Civil War was "a romantic hypothesis which will not stand against the facts." This anticipated the study by Nobel-laureate Robert Fogel, who would later conclude the same thing.^[1]

References

External links

• Harvard Kennedy School Obituary