Introduction to the Carleton Library Series Edition

What a treat is in store for readers of these essays.Harry Gordon Johnson was one of the best economists of the 1950s and 1960s, not just in Canada but worldwide.Had he not died young, in 1977, only seventeen days short of his fifty-fourth birthday, he might have won the Nobel Prize.And yet he was also a controversialist of the first rank.When he chose to be "unbuttoned," as he put it, he wrote with a caustic and dismissive elegance.In some passages of The Canadian Quandary it is as if H.L. Mencken has left Baltimore and come to Canada to take up economics.In this collection of Johnson's Canadian writings from the Diefenbaker years, 1957 to 1963, the most frequent victims of his derision are Canadian economic nationalists, led in that era by Walter Gordon, Lester Pearson's first finance minister and author of the Gordon Royal Commission Report of 1957.In fact, for most non-economist readers this volume will mainly be of interest as a contribution to the postwar debate on Canadian nationalism.Although nationalist views eventually came to dominate Canada's universities (economics departments sometimes excepted) and to influence the Trudeau government, when they were first bruited in the late 1950s and early 1960s they were frequently opposed.Johnson was one of their strongest critics.The heyday of left-wing nationalism is now past, of course.Trudeau's National Energy Policy and Foreign Investment Review Agency have long since been dismantled or neutered.But even in the supposedly "globalized" world of the early twenty-first century, questions of economic nationalism return again and again in policy debates about industrial subsidies, bank mergers, airline competition, patents, innovation, trade liberalization, and many other areas.It is a testament to the lucidity of Johnson's mind and to the vigour and clarity of his prose that many of viii INTRODUCTION his opinions on the mid-twentieth century incarnations of such debates are still fresh, interesting, and germane.THE MANAlong with Kingston-born Robert Mundell, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Economics, Toronto's Harry Gordon Johnson was the foremost Canadian economist of the first three postwar decades.He was also one of the most interesting characters economics has produced: a wrestler, a talented whittler, a user of snuff, a chain smoker, 2 a heavy drinker, a workaholic before the word existed, a brash, gregarious man with strong opinions and iron discipline who yet was often ill at ease socially.His wife paints a picture of eccentricity in recalling her husband at work: "wearing a Malayan sarong, a glass of iced coffee nearby, sitting in an armchair with a clipboard -not a proper clipboard ... but a piece of ordinary plywood -filling up a yellow legal pad with his surprisingly minuscule script" (Simpson zooi, 637).In that script Harry Johnson wrote prolifically, more than any other economist of his generation.After his death, his sometime co-author Jacob Frenkel counted "526 professional scientific articles" (Frenkel 1987(Frenkel , 1022,),).Johnson was also a famous traveller, lecturing, attending conferences, and "visiting" (that genteel academic avocation) widely.In the year before his death, three years after suffering a serious stroke, he visited fifteen countries.3 He influenced large numbers of economists through his editorship of several leading economics journals and he himself made important contributions to a number of different sub-disciplines.Would he have won the Nobel Prize?Richard Lipsey of Simon Fraser University, a friend of Johnson's and himself one of postwar Canada's most eminent economists, argues that he "was one of the major contributors to the currently accepted body of the real 4 theory of international trade" (Lipsey 1978, 835) and that if he is not so well known today, it is because "his work has suffered the fate of so many innovators: his ideas have become so much a part and parcel of the subject that few bother any more to reference their source, indeed many no longer even know the source" (Lipsey 2001, 618).For his part, 1981 Nobelist James Tobin wrote that Harry Johnson "was the people's choice within the profession.Though [Nobel] selection committees stress quantum innovations, sooner or later they would surely have rewarded the massive incremental and synthetic advancement of knowledge that Johnson achieved" (Tobin 1978, 457).Even if Johnson's work may not finally have had the unmistakable originality that would have brought him a Nobel, he was universally admired as a gifted synthesizer and filler-in of fields already established, an experi-THE ERA Between 1957 and1963, the world was still very much dominated by memory of "the War." Dwight Eisenhower, hero of D-Day, was president of the United States.Charles de Gaulle, liberator of Paris, came to power in France.Mao ruled China.Among postwar newcomers, Nikita Khruschev had just consolidated his control of the Soviet Union.In India, Pandit Nehru was prime minister; in Britain, Harold Macmillan.Konrad Adenauer, the liberal reformer, led West Germany.Dag Hammerskjold was UN Secretary-General.In retrospect, it was the deepest CHAPTER EIGHTEENThe final entry on the economics of opulence is "Apologia for Ad Men," a title that recalls David Ogilvie's Confessions of an Advertising Man, also published in 1963.It covers much the same ground as the

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