Lorie Tarshis


Lorie Tarshis was a Canadian economist who taught mostly at Stanford University. He is credited with writing the first introductory textbook that brought Keynesian thinking into American university classrooms, the 1947 . The work swiftly lost popularity after it was charged with excessive sympathy to communism by McCarthyist activists. Instead, the 1948 Economics by Paul Samuelson brought the Keynesian Revolution to the United States.

Education and career

Tarshis was born in Toronto and received a bachelor of commerce from the University of Toronto and master's and doctoral degrees in economics from Trinity College, Cambridge under the tutelage of John Maynard Keynes.
Tarshis came to the United States in 1936 as an instructor at Tufts University near Boston until 1939. He worked for the War Production Board in World War II and then became an operations analyst for the United States Army Air Forces at bomber commands in Libya, Tunisia and Italy. He returned to Tufts University in 1942 and continued teaching there until 1946.
Tarshis began teaching at Stanford in 1946, rising from assistant to associate to full professor. Later, he headed the department of economics at Stanford intermittently from 1950 to 1970. He then joined the faculty of Scarborough College, part of the University of Toronto system, and remained there until 1978 as a professor of economics. Until 1988 he was a professor and acting chairman of the department of economics at Glendon College, York University in Ontario. In his later years at Glendon College, he taught Intermediate Macroeconomics from his 1984 book, World Economy in Crisis: Unemployment, Inflation and International Debt.

McCarthyite attack

In The Vital Center, author Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. describes the attack on Tarshis:

Death

He died in a Toronto nursing home of Parkinson's disease at the age of 82.

Selected bibliography

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