The Railway Club. (Left to right) Back: Henry Yorke, Roy Harrod, Henry Weymouth, David Plunket Greene, Harry Stavordale, Brian Howard. Middle row: Michael Rosse, John Sutro, Hugh Lygon, Harold Acton, Bryan Guinness, Patrick Balfour, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, Johnny Drury-Lowe. Front: porters
Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod (13 February 1900 – 8 March 1978) was an English economist. He is best known for writing The Life of John Maynard Keynes (1951) and for the development of the Harrod–Domar model, which he and Evsey Domar developed independently. He is also known for his International Economics, a former standard textbook, the first edition of which contained some observations and ruminations (wanting in subsequent editions) that would foreshadow theories developed independently by later scholars (such as the Balassa–Samuelson effect).
After moving back to Oxford, he became a Student (i.e., Fellow) and Tutor in economics at Christ Church. He held the fellowship in modern history and economics until 1967. He remained in contact with Keynes until Keynes's death in 1946, and was later his biographer (1951). Harrod was additionally a Fellow at Nuffield College 1938 to 1947 and from 1954 to 1958.
After the death of his Cambridge friend and colleague, the economist John Maynard Keynes, in 1946, Harrod and Austin Robinson wrote a lengthy obituary of Keynes for The Economic Journal.[10] At the encouragement of Geoffrey Keynes, Harrod then undertook the task of writing a major biography of Keynes. The Life of John Maynard Keynes was published to widespread acclaim in 1951, at a time when most of Keynes's family and friends were still alive.
With the post-war influence of so-called Keynesian economics and then challenges to it, cultural interest in the Bloomsbury Group, and the publication of thirty volumes of The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes in the 1970s and 1980s,[11] high interest in Keynes's life led to further biographies, most prominently by Robert Skidelsky and Donald Moggridge, and to detailed studies such as by Donald Markwell on Keynes and international relations. These works have corrected and added details to the Keynes depicted by Harrod, and Skidelsky in particular has contrasted his account of Keynes with what he has depicted as Harrod's hagiography.[12]
List of works
"Doctrines of Imperfect Competition," Quarterly Journal of Economics 48 (May 1934), 442–470.
"The expansion of Credit in an Advancing Community", Economica NS 1 (August 1934), 287–299.
The Trade Cycle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).
"Utilitarianism Revised," Mind 45 (April 1936), 137–156.
"Mr. Keynes and Traditional Theory," Econometrica NS 5 (January 1937), 74–86.
"Scope and Method of Economics," Economic Journal 48 (Sept. 1938), 383–412.
^For example, Skidelsky in his John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883–1920 (1983) (unlike Harrod) gave prominence to Keynes's homosexual activity in his early adulthood, and to Keynes being a conscientious objector in World War I. See also, e.g., JSTOR40257846 Markwell contrasted his account of Keynes's approach to free trade after the 1920s with Harrod's. See, Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace, 2006.
P. M. Oppenheimer, 'Harrod, Sir (Henry) Roy Forbes (1900–1978)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2010 accessed 8 Oct 2011