John R. Meyer, interviewed by John C. Brown

John Robert Meyer is the James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Economic Growth, Emeritus, in the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was born in Pasco, Washington in 1927 and was educated at the University of Washington (B.A., 1950) and at Harvard (Ph.D., 1955). He joined the Harvard economics faculty in 1955 and taught at Yale University from 1968 to 1973; he returned to Harvard as Professor of Transportation, Logistics and Distribution at Harvard Business School (1973-83), and taught in the Kennedy School until he retired in 1997. From 1967 to 1977 he was President of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a position which led to his move to New Haven to be closer to the Bureau’s offices in New York. On returning to Massachusetts in 1973 he took the Bureau’s headquarters with him to Cambridge, retaining the New York office as a branch. Early in his career he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1958-9) and a Ford Faculty Research Fellowship at Harvard (1962-3). He has served on the editorial boards of several economics journals and was editor of Explorations in Entrepreneurial History in 1957. Meyer received Harvard’s David A. Wells Prize for his Ph.D. dissertation (1955a) and was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968. His expertise in transportation economics and policy has led him to serve as advisor to the Canadian Pacific Railway (1974-81), the US Department of Transportation, and the World Bank. He was a board member of Conrail (1976-8) and of the Union Pacific Corporation (1978-2000), and served as UP’s Vice Chairman (1981-3). On his retirement he was honored with a conference whose presentations compose the Festschrift noted in the Part introduction. Since his retirement he has resided both in Cambridge and in Florida and has been writing his 24th book, Enduring Enterprise: Public Policy and the Development of North American Railroads in the 20th Century, with Robert E. Gallamore. The interview took place in Meyer’s office at the Kennedy School in September 1994 and was conducted by J B of Clark University, who writes:Together with Alfred Conrad, John Meyer played a key role in the early development of Cliometrics. Two of their papers and the resulting discussion were particularly influential in the practice of economic history. One is “The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South,” which recast the plantation economy in terms amenable to economic analysis. Their finding that the return to an investment in a slave matched the return available elsewhere is a well known contribution of the paper. It also established a long research agenda on interregional trade in slaves, the demography of slavery and other issues, within a coherent economic framework. The slavery paper also illustrated the methodological contribution presented in another piece they aimed at economic historians, “Economic Theory, Statistical Inference, and Economic History,” which argued that economic historians should look for generalizations and test specific hypotheses. This second paper articulated an analytical distinction between primary literary evidence and the indirect quantitative evidence that could be used to test the implications even of qualitative hypotheses.

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