Happy 100th Birthday to Arnold Harberger
“Triangle Man” is now 100 years old.
Long-time University of Chicago economist Arnold Harberger turned 100 years old today. Unless I am mistaken, he is still going relatively strong, even in the classroom.
The Wikipedia article on some of Harberger’s accomplishments is actually quite good and so I won’t try to restate them.
Rather, I’ll tell 3 stories about my interactions with, and observations of, Al.
Number one: I first met Al at a cocktail party at the home of my colleague Ron Hansen in the late 1970s when I was a young assistant professor of economics at the University of Rochester’s Graduate School of Management (now the Simon School.) To me he was already a god because of ability to use basic price theory to reach important conclusions. But he didn’t act like a god. He was a normal and very welcoming human being.
Number two: When I was at the Cato Institute in 1979, Al helped me with data for an article that my friend Roy Childs was writing. Here are the details.
Number three: While the Chatham House rule applies to proceedings at the Mont Pelerin Society meetings, I can hue to the spirit of the rule in telling this story without naming names. At one of the events at the MPS meetings at the Hoover Institution in January 2020, there was a breakfast, if I recall correctly, at which Al spoke; he talked about what was going on in Chile. In the 1970s and later, Harberger had been very important, much more important than Milton Friedman, in helping move Chile’s economy in a free-market direction. I discuss his role very briefly in my review of Sebastian Edwards’ excellent 2023 book, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Economic Liberalism. (I would guess that his support of the Chicago Boys, even though he didn’t support Pinochet, is one reason he never was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics.) He had a long and tender relationship with various “Chicago Boys” from at least two generations and it was apparent in the way they questioned him and, to put it bluntly, showed their love for him.
If you’re wondering why I call him “Triangle Man,” check out this link. It’s a nice extensive and understandable treatment of Harberger’s classic 1954 article in the American Economic Review, “Monopoly and Resource Allocation.” Economists had been stating for decades that monopoly caused deadweight loss but he was the first to try to estimate the size of the deadweight loss. Harberger found that, for U.S. manufacturing, it was unlikely to be above 0.1 percent of GNP. (Gross National Product was the conventional measure of the size of an economy at the time.) There are, to be sure, various criticisms of his argument and estimate. The point is that he did it and no one before him had done so. The deadweight loss from monopoly is typically measured by a triangle. Thus the nickname, one which was used in various skits put on by University of Chicago students and one that he wore proudly.
Note: The pic above is of Al Harberger and me after his breakfast talk.
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