Remembering Geoff

Wylie Bradford, GCH

Geoff Harcourt was a mentor and friend to me for more than half my life. In terms of my professional life and identity, the person I turned into via that channel, I would have nothing without him. He literally shaped everything about me, and mere words are insufficient to express the debt I owe or the gratitude I feel to him.

I first encountered Geoff in 1987 when he visited Newcastle to give a lecture, the subject matter of which was the historiography of Post-Keynesian economics. I didn’t really know what any of that meant, but I went along out of curiosity. I listened to him weave his magic (no one was better at encapsulating intellectual history through the prism of personalities) and watched him debating with Allan Oakley (one of my teachers that I admired and one of Geoff’s former students) and I was transfixed. I didn’t know the names Robinson, Kaldor, Pasinetti etc at that point, but what mesmerised me was the battle and the interplay of ideas. I had started studying philosophy as well as economics, and I had grown up loving James Burke’s Connections so the meta-relationships among sets of ideas really was my bread and butter, and here was a feast indeed. I was so energised by the experience, and the tantalising prospect of how much I had to learn, that I decided then and there that I wanted to remain in academia which, to my naïve mind, was the realm of pure and lofty intellectual struggle and debate. Geoff’s inspiration opened the door to the life path that I chose. It’s hard to be more influential than that.

Our paths crossed next when he returned to Newcastle to do a seminar in 1991, by which time I had completed my Honours degree and had started working as a tutor. This was another masterclass in the inimitable Harcourt style – effortlessly erudite, massively engaging and funny, totally authentic and free of artifice. This was my introduction to many of the classic riffs (‘I’m a real man not a money man’ etc) and while I don’t remember the exact subject matter (something Keynesian no doubt) I do vividly recall his backhand description of Milton Friedman as ‘that vulgar little man who never read the General Theory properly’ which has been attached to that individual in my mind ever since. At lunchtime I was able to meet him properly and ask his advice in my quest to get a scholarship to study overseas. He was, characteristically, incredibly enthusiastic and supportive to a mere kid from the sticks, encouraging me to apply to Cambridge and guaranteeing me his support on the application. He followed through on that and the next year I was off to do a PhD in the very golden land of legend I had heard about a few years before. Whatever mixed feelings I might have had about the Cambridge experience at times, I know full well that it was truly transformational for me both personally and intellectually. That transformative experience I owe to Geoff and his intervention and support.

Within a decade he had been instrumental in changing my life a second time. The Cambridge years were a banquet of delights. It was such a privilege to be able to drop in to see Geoff at his office (legendarily messy, but brilliant-messy unlike the mere messy-messy that mine would subsequently be) and shoot the breeze about economics, cricket, his latest projects (always multiple) and so on. He always had something interesting to pass on, like a ‘bootleg’ translation of Sraffa’s 1925 paper (which I still have) or something he wanted my comments on (always a surreal prospect that he was interested in my opinion on his work but I see now that it was all part of the mentoring process). Being alone in a strange new environment I truly valued the positive focal point he provided, and that he was able to see past my deficiencies in the ‘winning friends and influencing people’ department. I went to watch him lecture whenever I could as he was simply the best I ever saw. I reveled in his passion and ability to bring along even snooty Cambridge undergrads by being completely genuine, totally masterful and unceasingly funny and engaging. It was always a tour de force that utterly inspired me and although I could never replicate the performance, I did aspire to live up to the values I saw on display in his craft. In that, as in all things I did, I strove to produce outcomes that he would approve of, that he would consider worthy. I don’t mean that in any cringey sense, rather that there was no higher standard I could conceive of, and I knew that aiming for his standard would mean that the inevitable falling short would still result in a fine standard indeed. When I switched to the Teaching and Leadership career path I was worried that he would be disappointed in me for eschewing research as part of my job. I would not have been able to abide that, but part of that decision reflected how profound an impression he made on me by being a fundamental generator of knowledge through research who was also so passionate about being a disseminator of knowledge via teaching. In that profound career change I was carrying through the lessons learned sitting on the benches in Cambridge lecture halls watching Geoff in full, glorious flight. On the research side, of course, he agreed to be my PhD supervisor which was immensely thrilling for me, but also potentially challenging for him. He was an unparalleled expert on one leg of my project (Post-Keynesian economics) and quite unfamiliar with the other (Rawls) and, as I will readily admit, my characteristic fascination with meta-perspectives meant that the whole thing inhabits the shadowy borderland between the insightful and the insane. Nevertheless, he was an incredible supervisor – always encouraging and engaged, meticulous and quick in his feedback (even if I never got to Prue Kerr levels of being able to read his writing!) and a furnisher of fundamental and impactful recommendations. In fact, it was his suggestions that lead me to read two books that not only changed my intellectual life but also formed the bedrock of my PhD thesis – Luigi Pasinetti’s Structural Change and Economic Growth and Ugo Pagano’s Work and Welfare in Economic Theory. The whole thing could never have come off without those steps and that, and the root-and-branch impact the formulation of those arguments had on my understanding of so many things are once again down to Geoff and his influence on me. He stunned me by asking me to co-author a chapter with him when he was putting together the ‘Second Edition’ of the General Theory volumes. I couldn’t believe it – I was less than nobody, a speck, a mid-candidature PhD student, and not only was I being given the incredible opportunity to actually write with Geoff but also to have my name appear in a work alongside Pasinetti, Goodwin, Eisner, Tobin and many more luminaries. I threw myself wholeheartedly into my part of that chapter as the stakes were higher than ever and I had to come up with something worthy of having his name attached. It was initially a curveball as we were looking at Chapter 4 of The GT which is all about units and issues of mensuration. The deep dive I took ended up completely changing the way I thought about some very fundamental aspects of economics, so much so that more than once I have been described as holding that ‘it’s all about units’. So, again, Geoff was the agent behind a pivotal recalibration and an intellectual growth spurt in my life. Asking me to co-author with him was an incredible act of generosity, but it was actually what he did. I wasn’t special – he did this kind of thing for basically everyone. He never stopped providing opportunities for his students, introducing and promoting them to the great and famous (going to a conference with Geoff was a dizzying experience – you were bound to meet every single person there!) and involving them in collaborative ventures of various kinds. He was similarly giving to his colleagues, and even those he didn’t know. Geoff would listen to every paper at a HETSA conference and would always contrive a meaningful question so that presenters felt they had been heard and engaged with rather than hung out to dry in a miasma of stony indifference.

The last time I saw him, in hospital in late October, he was preoccupied with the situation of my dear friend Sean Turnell (to whom Geoff was also close) currently still arbitrarily detained in Burma. It is so emblematic of him that even in the gathering twilight of his own life his thoughts were on the welfare of someone else. He was a Black Swan event in academia – in a world so often characterised by mendacious self-regard, he was the living evidence of the possibility of being successful without dragging down or undercutting others, that being giving and generous were viable and sustainable ways to conduct oneself in the profession. I heard him speak often of Keynes’s fretting over the dilemma of being good and doing good as pursuits. He never realised that he skirted the problem all together, effortlessly being both at all times naturally. His living example helped me keep faith in my chosen profession, even as I saw its shortcomings in action. It was possible to still believe in the possibility of nobility and the highest standards, as I had been directly in their presence.

After Cambridge, I got the job at Macquarie because there were two of his former students there to vouch for me. In the subsequent years I would see Geoff when I could, usually lunching at UNSW. It was always wonderful to catch up with him, and to marvel at how unstoppable he seemed. He continued to tap me to write things for his projects here and there and, as usual, each one of those contributed mightily to my intellectual growth (partially, again, as producing something for him was a somewhat nerve-wracking experience due to the self-imposed expectations). He just never stopped influencing my life for the better. It is unusual to be able to say of someone that they made your dreams come true, but Geoff did, and he did it simply by being himself. He inspired the dream, cultivated and enabled the dream, and ultimately validated it. He had been to the Mountain, and his very existence showed that the image of the intellectual Shangri-La I had conjured on my head was not entirely fanciful. He had walked with the Olympians and carried the torch of their values forward. The light of that torch is what I worship, a set of beliefs about what to do, and how and why to do it. My belief in him, and what he both represented and contributed as a person, has underpinned my very identity personally for literally the majority of my years on Earth. To use an inside Keynes reference that I am sure he would enjoy, my indebtedness and obligation to him are the Danaid jar, and my admiration, esteem and love for him are the widow’s cruse. In terms of the things I believe in and the values I hold dear, Geoff Harcourt was the greatest person I ever met in my life, and Fortune smiled never so sweetly upon me as when it brought me into his orbit. Vale, Geoff. Ave et vale.