Economist Lloyd Reynolds, R. I. P.
One of my old professors from undergrad days at Yale, Lloyd Reynolds, died this year. I took “Eight Great Economists” from him (Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Mill, Keynes, Marshall, Schumpeter, Fisher), a very good course reading the original works. He didn’t say much that I remember about them, but he didn’t have to—it was the reading and writing that taught us. I found an obituary which says he shoudl get credit as the department chair who lifted Yale economics from the liberal mediocrity criticized by Buckley around 1951 to its later liberal eminence.
In 1945, Reynolds joined the Yale faculty, where he remained for 35 years until his retirement in 1980. In 1951, he became chair of Yale’s Department of Economics. In the next eight years, he increased the number of faculty in economics from 31 to 65, including such notable scholars as William Fellner, Tjalling Koopmans, John Montias, Hugh Patrik, Gustav Ranis, James R. Tobin, Robert Triffin and Henry Wallich. Two later won Nobel Prizes. A third Nobel Laureate, Simon Kuznets, was soon wooed back to Harvard.
In later years, Yale President Kingman Brewster liked to tell the story of meeting Reynolds on Martha’s Vineyard. Brewster remembered asking Reynolds, “Would you take me out behind the barn some day and tell me how it is you turned one of the worst departments in the country into one of the best?”
“I don’t have to take you out behind the barn,” replied Reynolds. “It’s very simple — just be willing to hire people who are brighter than you are.”
Early in his term as chair, Reynolds confronted the firestorm caused by the publication of “God and Man at Yale,” in which William Buckley criticized “the hot collectivist turn taken by the [economics] faculty after the war” and argued that such faculty should be fired….
“[I]n the early 1950s, he was able to convert a spirited defense of the department against right wing critics into an occasion for the substantial infusion of outside resources. It was his great capacity to recognize talent in others which helped attract a first-rate faculty, including the move of the Cowles Commission to Yale.”