JOHNSON, HARRY GORDON

born May 26, 1923, Toronto died May 8, 1977, Geneva Canadian-born economist who managed to synthesize diverse viewpoints in economics. He was one of the more important economists of the post-World War II era, with a published output that dwarfed those of his contemporaries and made substantial contributions to the fields of macroeconomics and international trade. Johnson studied at the University of Toronto (M.A., 1947), the University of Cambridge (M.A., 1951), and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1958). He taught at Cambridge (194856) and then, after three years at the University of Manchester, became a professor at the University of Chicago. At the time of his death he was in the unusual position of holding full professorships at two major institutions, the University of Chicago, where he was the Charles F. Grey Professor of Economics (from 1974), and the London School of Economics (from 1966). Johnson was a prolific and versatile economist. He helped to sythesize Keynesian thinking with the neoclassical tradition of microeconomics. He wrote on such diverse topics as the brain drain, research and development, and the economics of higher education. He is regarded as a widely read synthesist with the ability to see the unifiable elements in the literature covering a huge field. Perhaps his most important contributions are in trade theory, where he was an early proponent of the concept of effective trade protection and later published significant work on tariffs, balance of payments, and growth. He advocated the classical monetary approach to the balance-of-payments problems.