Goodwin Celebrates Journalist Walter Lippmann in New Book
16 October 2014 2:46PM
Famed American journalist Walter Lippmann corresponded with many leading economic thinkers of the 20th century, including Friedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, Lionel Robbins, and Frank Taussig. Though Lippmann was considered to be an influential thinker in his own right, he has never been perceived to be an economist himself – until now.
In Duke Professor Craufurd Goodwin’s new book out this month, he presents Lippmann in a different light. Goodwin’s book, “Walter Lippmann: Public Economist,” marks the conclusion of years of research.
“Lippmann has always been presented as a political commentator and public philosopher,” Goodwin said. “No one had perceived him as a ‘public economist,’ someone who responds to the questions of the wider public about the economy in which they live.”
The James. B. Duke professor of economics published two articles on the journalist – the first nearly 15 years ago – and always felt the icon deserved longer treatment in a book. It wasn’t until the Perkins Library at Duke University purchased the microfilms of the Walter Lippmann Papers MS 326 from Yale University on Goodwin’s behalf, that his project became a reality. It took the economic historian about a year to read most of Lippmann’s correspondence and other materials, and about another year to “figure out what it all meant.”
Lippmann was a prolific writer, writing books, magazines, and newspaper columns. The latter is particularly notable; from 1931 to 1967 he wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column several days a week that reached millions of readers.
In Goodwin’s view, Lippmann was a “truly exceptional journalist” who skillfully inserted economics into the policy process. “He was extremely smart and had enormous self-confidence. He was willing to tackle any question and to work through any body of unfamiliar literature. He did not patronize his readers and was willing to change his mind if persuasive new evidence and argument were presented to him,” Goodwin said. “I wanted to see how his mind worked and understand his secrets.”
The result of this is a book that not only describes Lippmann’s efforts to explain to the masses the nature of the economic problems they faced, as well as the virtues and vices of the public policies that sought to address them, but also examines the columnist’s responses to them.
“So many of the problems with which Lippmann dealt are with us still,” Goodwin said. He cited some examples of issues that plagued the U.S. government then and now: how to maintain full employment without inflation; how to cope with income inequality; how to prepare for external conflict without damaging the economy.
Authors and book critics already have praised Goodwin’s work. Journalist and author Jeff Madrick said the biography is “a fascinating book that reminds us how much better public commentary on the economy can be than it is today,” and Kirkus Reviews calls it a “finely limned portrait of a man whose career was based on standards and purposes that seem to have largely disappeared from public life.”
Up next for Goodwin is a study of how early economists responded to the emergence of psychology from roughly 1890 to 1940.
Read The Wall Street Journal's review of "Walter Lippmann: Public Economist."
Learn more about Professor Craufurd Goodwin.
Interested in the history of economics? Visit the CHOPE website.