EEJ:

You have something of a reputation in our profession for doing things "your way." Your retirement" to a post at the New School of International Studies at the Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo seems entirely in character! Can we reminisce for a few minutes about the life and career of Martin Bronfenbrenner, beginning with your choice of economics as a profession and a Chicago Ph.D. as your first big step in that direction?

Bronfenbrenner:

How can I possibly resist this opportunity to talk about one of my favorite subjects--myself? I was a political science major during my undergraduate days at Washington University. My shift to Economics resulted chiefly from my experience with intercollegiate debating on economic subjects centering on the then seemingly insoluable Great Depression. That, along with an intellectual predisposition toward a crude economic interpretation of history, closer to "scandal theory" than to Karl Marx, led me to undertake an MA program. But I never intended to become an economist. Financial Journalism was to have been my profession. I didn't choose Chicago; they chose me with their offer of a half scholarship (which I hope they do not regret). I went there never having heard of the "Chicago School." Once there, I was anything but sympathetic to what I later came to understand as "Chicago economics." I considered myself a socialist, having read a little Marxism. I would have voted for Norman Thomas in 1932, had I been old enough to vote. I thought the issue was not "control versus the market" but simply "control by whom?" I went on to a doctorate, mainly because the depression hung on. There were few jobs in economic journalism for smart-aleck kids!

EEJ:

Weren't you a bit intimidated by the austere environment of technical economics?

Bronfenbrenner:

I had some fear that graduate school "rigor" would ruin my writing skills and owe much to the encouragement of Paul Douglas to persevere. I overlapped with no fewer than four future Nobel Prize economists: Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman and Herbert Simon. Allen Wallis (later President of Rochester and now Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs), was also among my fellow students, as were Herbert Stein (later Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers), Jacob Mosak, H. Gregg Lewis, Melvin Reder, and Hyman Minsky. (To make matters worse, some of these, including both Samuelson and Simon, knew more as undergraduates than I did as a graduate student.) But Paul Douglas assured me that "one doesn't have to be a Samuelson to become an economist"--the best advice I ever got at Chicago.

EEJ:

Chicago economics has been called oppressive and monolithic. Were you converted, or were you under pressure to conform?

Bronfenbrenner:

Neither, although some fellow-students advised me to shun the American Student Union (the 1930s version of the later Students for a Democratic Society) if I expected a job recommendation. In retrospect the faculty was quite balanced. There was, of course, a conservative and later anti-Keynesian group, which included Knight, Simons, Lloyd Mints, and to a lesser extent also Viner. But there was also a New Deal group--Douglas, Schultz, Harry Millis, Simeon Leland and John Nef. And before I was through, Oscar Lange and Abba Lerner arrived to present both Keynes and "market socialism." So the picture of Chicago as a hotbed of authoritarian reaction is wildly exaggerated; I personally never encountered any problems although Knight kidded me about following the Joan Robinson route from imperfect competition through Keynes to Marxism. I might also remark that Chicago's sociologists and political scientists were pretty solidly New Deal, and that their students were interacting with the economists.

EEJ:

What about your thesis? And your first job?

Bronfenbrenner:

My thesis was a disappointment. I tried to do what Don Patinkin would actually do 15 years later, but my attempt was overly Walrasian and got itself sidetracked into counting equations and unknowns. It was the last thesis completed under Henry Schultz before his premature death in California. I'm not sure what one would call my "first job." I had a part-time teaching and research assistantship in statistics at Chicago in 1937-38. My first full-time job, which Professor Schultz got for me, was an instructorship in economics at the Central YMCA College (later Roosevelt University) downtown; it offered a 15-hour teaching load, an annual salary of $2000, and no worry about tenure. But between them these two jobs, left me "hooked" on teaching.

EEJ:

What were Depression-era students like?

Bronfenbrenner:

Circa 1937-38 Chicago students were perhaps the best I have ever had. The Y- College students, both day and night, were a very mixed and even bimodal bag. About a third of them were bright kids who had missed out on scholarships to Chicago. Another third were playboys suspended for poor scholarship, mainly from Illinois or Northwestern. The final third, mainly in night classes, were hard-working pluggers, often worn out by their day's work. I got along famously with the first group, and ignored the rest (but seldom flunked anyone). The Administration let me get away with this. Indeed, I have always had chairmen and deans who forgave my elitism and intellectual snobbery, not to mention colleagues who enjoyed entertaining passive "average students" better than I did. Elitism has yielded me both small classes and good teaching evaluations. It may also have cost me administrative promotions to chairmanships and deanships, but I never felt myself possessed of administrative or managerial talent anyway.

EEJ:

But you did get out into the "real world" eventually?

Bronfenbrenner:

Yes and, indeed, quite early, if you consider Washington and the Federal Reserve System parts of the real world. Getting into the "real world" was a kind of medicine, like courses in higher mathematics and statistics, that I swallowed in the belief that it might be good for me. And besides, the pay was better--an important consideration, after one gets married. So I went to the Treasury as a revenue estimator and then into Foreign Funds Control, and later to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. These offered very little intellectual stimulation, but lots of day-to-day office politics disguised as "human relations," sometimes under singularly stupid bosses. When I had opportunities for parttime teaching, I took them, and enjoyed my classes more than my regular jobs.

EEJ:

By this time the U.S. must have become involved in World War 11?

Bronfenbrenner:

Decidedly so. The news of Pearl Harbor came while I was napping on that Sunday afternoon, but I found about it as soon as I left our Chicago apartment the next morning. The extent of the war's popularity was such that one could not openly engage in draft-dodging. But I joined the Treasury's Foreign Funds Control staff a few months later and attended Treasury Spanish classes several times a week in the hope of a draft- exempt post to Latin America, most probably to Argentina. But then orders came from on high, meaning Secretary Morganthau: No foreign postings for draft-age people, and I started looking elsewhere. I neither wanted nor anticipated 4-F status; my principal worry was an intermediate I-B classification which might mean latrine-cleaning or check-signing for the duration. What eventually turned up was Japanese Language School in the Navy. I qualified, I was accepted, and though I fear I was overconfident of my abilities in language-learning. Eventually I became a Japanese language officer under the control of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI, or in Japanese, Oni, meaning "devil").

EEJ:

And that wartime experience began your interest in the Japanese economy?

Bronfenbrenner:

Yes, it did. Language School itself was a chamber of horrors and a considerable misinvestment of my intellectual capital in rote memory. So why did I not let bygones be bygones after the war, and cancel out the whole experience as a nightmare? Mainly because postwar Japan, when I finally got there, after the atom bombs and the Japanese surrender, was something I have never seen before or since. It was a society transforming itself before my eyes from a military dictatorship to something very different, although nobody knew just what. (What was the difference, I was asked, between individualism, liberalism, and Communism") There was also a great out-pouring of good feeling, economically miserable but too good to last. So I wanted to go back--and met the present Mrs. Bronfenbrenner on my second trip, my first marriage having become a casualty of wartime separation. And all the time my interest was broadening from linguistic and military matters to history and economics, and eventually from Japan to East Asia as a whole. So here I am in Japan--on my 18th trip. Japan is still "good to the last drop," but the first drops were much better. No more than anyone else did I anticipate the "miracle" of Japanese growth and recovery, and most of the time I wish it hadn't happened.

EEJ:

Getting back to the War, did the Navy find any way to use your economics along with your Japanese language?

Bronfenbrenner:

They tried, at one point. I had a spell of POW (prisoner of war) indoctrination duty in Hawaii. I was pretty good at it, and developed skills that still come in handy on oral examinations. Since I had been an economist in civilian life, I was assigned POWs who had worked in factories. (Economists know all about factories, do they not?) We had aerial photos of the factories where these POWs had worked, and I questioned them about what was made in this or that building, where the workers lived, how the power lines ran, where materials and fuel and finished products were stored. We supplied these details to the Army Air Force which then fire-bombed the middle of town.

EEJ:

But in 1946-47, back in the U.S., when you were resuming your academic career how did the academic job market of those days compare with the present time?

Bronfenbrenner:

It was very different. There was no JOE (Job Openings for Economists); the market was even more imperfect than it now is. Salaries had lagged far behind inflation, so high-ranking institutions were throwing in rank and tenure as fringe benefits. Wisconsin was one of these, which is how I achieved a tenured Associated Professorship at age 32--but at a salary well below what I had been getting at the Chicago Fed. I had published several things already, but I don't think I would, with those credentials, have been worth a tenure rank at Wisconsin in today's market.

EEJ:

But you didn't stay in Madison, did you? In fact, you have moved around more than most economists. Not only among universities but also among fields of specialization. Haven't these factors been professional negatives?

Bronfenbrenner:

Some of my moves were bad mistakes. I thought things would happen (or not happen) when I was (or where I was going), and my forecasts were often wrong. I can however say that I was pulled rather than pushed-- even when nearing retirement age--and that I said "No" more often than "Yes" to job nibbles I received. Another point: Only at Duke did I have a house I hated to leave, and I stayed there 13 years, and I hope to return there.

EEJ:

I've also heard some negative comments about your working in what strikes some as an excessive number of branches of economics. Haven't you spread yourself a bit thin?

Bronfenbrenner:

Yes, that's the frustrated Journalist in me. I get interested in new fields, and sometimes get bored with old ones. I can't for example, understand Edward Chamberlin spending his whole life on the implications of monopolistic competition, of William Jaffeé: spending his on the details of Leon Walras' life and work. But on the other hand I am glad to see others do that sort of in depth work because then I don't have to, and I'm not accusing either Chamberlin or Jaffeé of wasting his time.

EEJ:

Didn't you, however, concentrate on income distribution problems for over 20 years--from 1948 to 1970, approximately?

Bronfenbrenner:

Yes, but mainly as a reaction against several intellectual annoyances, especially at Wisconsin: First, the view that the trade union movement and its leadership was the voice of the people, rather than that of a few prominent labor aristocracies. Second, the notion that equality is costless, so that we need not worry about incentives to accumulate either physical or human capital. I also dissented from the widespread view that we had no theory of input pricing. It seems to me rather that we have a good start, although not full generality, on both the demand side (marginal productivity) and in the supply side (the labor-leisure choice, with analogues for other inputs). Finally, I could not accept the Left Keynesian notion that employment and unemployment is independent of wage rates.

EEJ:

Why then does your book not reflect the criticisms of mainstream distribution theory already "in the air" at that time?

Bronfenbrenner:

I was, and still am, critical of the practice of concentrating intermediate and graduate price theory courses upon the important special case of competitive output, pricing with input prices taken as given--until the last week of the course, that is. Unfortunately, my big book on Income Distribution Theory (1971) did little to remedy that fallacy. "Neo- Cambridge" happened during the book's gestation period, and I underestimated its importance, though I spent at least five years too long in writing partly because I was moving from place to place and partly because I was dabbling in too many other aspects of economics. By ignoring the "Cambridge revolution" my income distribution book read like a resurrection of the Dark Ages in the early 1970s. I have tried to remedy this defect in a few subsequent and obscure papers, and when I teach Distribution Theory these days, I hope I go beyond my obsolete 1971 book.

EEJ:

And what of life now in Tokyo and more particularly at Aoyama Gakuin University?

Bronfenbrenner:

As big cities go, Tokyo is not an unpleasant place to live. It is neither so smoggy nor--outside the foreigner's "golden ghettos"--as expensive as tourists say. Apartments are indeed small, traffic is indeed heavy, and rush hours are indeed long, but the crime problem is much less acute than back home. At the university there is not much collegiality--everyone lives too far from everyone else--but individual colleagues are interesting. The students are much like those in any fraternity-ridden U.S. university, but the fraternities have no Greek letters. Also, studious types like the pre-medics, pre-legals, and pre- graduate school types are almost entirely absent, and I certainly miss them. Japan has very few universities from which people go on to more advanced in- house courses in companies. Aoyama would like to become one of these, and I hope they will succeed-but they haven't as yet.

EEJ:

What of the practical problem of communicating with your students?

Bronfenbrenner:

I lecture in English, by order of the Ministry of Education. This is an obvious advantage at present, but I may live long enough to regret its slowing down my progress in technical Japanese. I teach two courses in the international area, one in trade and the other finance, plus one seminar in economic history and one in the history of economic thought. Each of these meets one one-and-a-half-hour session a week. They keep me busy, because I've never taught much of the material before. . . How do I like it? Well, it beats the old rocking chair and retirement.

EEJ:

What do you consider your most important contribution to economics?

Bronfenbrenner:

Torch-carrying and torch-passing. I have helped to keep general economics respectable and, by focusing on the economics of Japan, tried to make country-specialized economics respectable. In perhaps 40 years of teaching I have encouraged some 30 excellent students at various stages of their development. I have had a number of individual ideas which I thought original and important, but most of them were only subjectively original, or were wrong, or were more usefully and fruitfully developed by others.

EEJ:

You have spoken out against economics as a branch of applied mathematics and statistics. Is the mathematical-econometric-computer orientation of the discipline due for dethronement in your opinion, and if so, when will it happen?

Bronfenbrenner:

It's overdue, but when it comes it will not simply push us back to where we were 100 years ago. It will leave an extremely important residue behind. I hope it goes only far enough for someone with a mathematical allergy to harbor realistic hopes of becoming more than a second-class citizen in economics. When this will happen I have no idea. Perhaps the radicals' "political economy" movement is a step in the right direction, despite all the emotionalism, and deliberate misinterpretation of "bourgeois economics." I agree with Joseph Schumpeter that on all-or-none terms, history outranks mathematics, although in fact it's not an all-or-none matter. Putting it another way, we now have two streams of entrants into our profession--like the Missouri and Mississippi rivers joining near St. Louis. One branch-- now the dominant one, in terms of the probability of attaining first-class citizenship--comes from mathematics, the physical sciences, and engineering, and its knowledge of history is lamentably small. The other branch, the second-class-citizen branch from which I come, issues from history and the other social studies; its weakness is on the mathematical side. What I'm hoping will be achieved some day, but have not furthered in my own career, is some sort of fusion and homogenization between the desiccated robots and the bleeding hearts, between pure technique in search of a problem and pure social consciousness in search of analysis.

EEJ:

With things as they are, what advice do you have for the neophyte economist?

Bronfenbrenner:

Over and above watchful waiting, I have six minor points which may add up to a major one: I'm hoping anyone reading this conversation will have completed an undergraduate program which included a good deal of math, statistics, and history along with economics. If the choice of a graduate school has not yet been made I would urge (1) Get an M.A. at some intermediate-level campus, preferably in a small program with individual attention. And while there, if you can, make up your deficiencies in math, statistics, and history. (2) Take your writing seriously. Short papers are your best vaccine against writing blocks on dissertations, a disease which is not technically fatal but achieves a high mortality rate. (3) If you can't write an excellent thesis--and few people can--don't bother to raise a marginal one to the level of mediocrity, and avoid thesis committees which force you to do so. 500 pages of scissors, paste, and computer output are no more weighty than 100 pages. They just weigh five times as much. (4) Neurosis (most commonly depression) is to academic work what black lung is to the coal-miner or sore arm to the baseball pitcher. You should assume that you will get it sooner or later. (5) As Paul Douglas told me as an aspiring but discouraged Chicago graduate student, "You don't have to be as good as Samuelson to get along in economics," though, alas, getting along does not confer first-class citizenship.

*Prof. International Economics, Aoyama Gakuin University; Kenan Prof. of Economics, Emeritus, Duke University.

**Posted with permission from Harold M. Hochman, Editor, Eastern Economic Journal.