Harold Demsetz on Protestors
Some memories of Harold Demsetz at Chicago and UCLA during protests.
Watching the videos of police moving in on protestors at my graduate alma mater, UCLA, brought back some fond memories of the person who got me into economics, Harold Demsetz.
First some background, before I repost something from EconLog.
In 1970, during a number of campus protests, a bomb was found outside the Economics Department of UCLA, on the second floor. It didn’t go off. I’ve never been able to get clear what level of danger it would have caused if it had exploded. Was it a “cherry bomb,” which, in itself can do some real damage if someone gets close? I don’t know. In any case, it understandably made a lot of people nervous.
Indeed, that bomb, and the overall way Chancellor Chuck Young handled the demonstrations, was, I believe, what led James Buchanan, then at UCLA after leaving the University of Virginia, to write Academia in Anarchy, co-authored with Nicos E. Devletoglou. Buchanan wanted out of there as fast as he could get. (My memory is hazy here because I read their book over 50 years ago.)
So that was the setting that Harold Demsetz entered when he moved from the University of Chicago to UCLA in the fall of 1971.
So now, here are the two stories about Demsetz at the University of Chicago in 1970 (when I visited him) and at UCLA circa 1971.
First, some background. When I visited Harold at the University of Chicago in May 1970, a lot of the student protests were going on. He took me to the faculty club to have lunch with his colleagues and on the way, a fairly polite student asked him if he wanted a flyer. It was about how bad a man the guy who founded the University of Chicago, John D. Rockefeller, was. I’ll never forget Harold’s answer. In an exasperated tone, he said, “I’ve had enough.”
At the Harold Demsetz Conference, held at UCLA, Tom Hazlett and I gave luncheon talks about Harold. I told, of course, about the big influence he had on my career, namely helping give me a career. After, Harold got up and reminisced. One reminiscence was that when a lot of the student protests were going on at UCLA in the early 1970s, just after he got there, a leftist student came into his class during the lecture and announced that because this was an economics class, the students were being misled because capitalism hurts consumers.
Now, given what you read above, what would you expect him to do or say, not to someone offering a leaflet, but to someone actually disrupting a class? Think about that before you read the next paragraph and I’ll give some space so you don’t immediately read the next one.
Harold answered calmly, “Oh, no, economics is pro-consumer.” The student paused, and then said, “Right on!” Then he left. Harold continued his class.
LOL
What an unexpected, but beautiful ending!