These memorial remarks for Lloyd Metzler come from Evsey Domar’s papers. Edward S. Mason and Evsey D. Domar’s remarks have been transcribed in full. I have only provided excerpts of those by Paul Samuelson that were published later in Vol. V of his Collected Scientific Papers. The common denominator of all three remembrances is that Metzler was an outlier among economists both with respect to his analytical abilities and contributions to economics as well with respect to his uncommon utter decency. It appears even back then, nice guys in economics attracted as much attention as an albino moose today. Samuelson’s speculative remark regarding Metzler’s assignment to the “Burbank ghetto” is priceless as is his recounting of Keynes’ less than sage advice to Sidney Alexander.
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LLOYD A. METZLER
1913-1980
by Edward S. Mason
We are here to celebrate the life of Lloyd Metzler who gave comfort and pleasure not only to his family but to a host of friends. In the six short years he was at Harvard, he made a name for himself as a scholar of promise and a man to whom others turned for help and companionship.
Lloyd took his first degree at the University of Kansas and studied under a man who was my own teacher and who taught John Lintner and a number of others who later came to Harvard. I’d like to say a word about this man, John Ise, who left his imprint on Lloyd, on me, and on all those who passed through his hands. Ise was one of five children who grew up on the Kansas prairies just after the Sod House days that he later wrote about. All of these children went through the University and all made their mark in life. He was a strong man who fought for his unpopular opinions and encouraged his students to strike out for themselves. I know he impressed Lloyd as much as he did me.
After teaching two years at Kansas, Lloyd came to the Graduate School at Harvard in 1936. It was an interesting period in Cambridge and in the Department of Economics. The old guard was leaving the Department and a new crew coming in. Taussig, Carver, and Bullock retired; Ripley died; and Gay left for the Huntington library. These were the stalwarts who had dominated the Department since 1900. Early in the 1930s, Schumpeter, Leontief, and Haberler joined the Department and, later, Hansen, Schlichter, and Black. They were a vigorous crew. Lloyd early discovered his major interest in international trade and worked, in particular, with Hansen and Haberler. Harvard economics was also fortunate in attracting during that period a number of exceptional graduate students, a number of whom are here with us today. I am sure that Lloyd learned as much from them as from his teachers and, in the process, gave as much as he took.
The 1930s were also a period of upheaval in the country and in the University. In some respects it resembled the late 1960s though the protagonists and antagonists were not as strident or violent. It was a period when new ideas percolated the environment and questions of public policy were much to the fore. The influence of Keynes dominated the last few years of the decade, and Lloyd soon found himself in the middle of Keynesian controversies.
After leaving Harvard in 1942, he spent a year as a Guggenheim Fellow and then joined the Office of Strategic Services for a year. Although OSS had a good stable of economists, I am sure that he felt more at home at the Federal Reserve Board where he served from 1944 to 1946. After that a brief period at Yale, and then the University of Chicago where he was a distinguished member of the Economics Department for the rest of his life.
I leave it to others to comment on his considerable scholarly accomplishments, but want to say something about how Lloyd impressed me as a young man. He was obviously much more than an economist, with deep interests in music and literature. He was a cultivated man who in some respects reminded me of Allyn Young who also had a great interest in music and who, for a brief moment in the 1920s, shed his light on Harvard. Young looked more like a poet than an economist though I admit it is difficult for me to describe just what an economist is supposed to look like. Lloyd was a sensitive gentleman with a gift for friendship. Everyone who knew him like him and all of us join Edith in deeply mourning his departure.
ON LLOYD METZLER
by Evsey D. Domar
Last Sunday, The New York Times reviewed another book on President Truman. He is a gold mine for historians. A man of modest ability, yet a good president. Well, perhaps not quite so good… On the other hand, by comparison with our presidents in the recent past and, may I add, expected in the near future, a giant indeed… Many contradictions in his character and performance and so on. Could you find a better man to write about?
Lloyd Metzler does not offer such wonderful opportunities. As I look back over nearly forty years since I first met him, I don’t find contradictions either in his character nor in his actions; what stands out is a man of rare intellectual ability, remarkable modesty and much kindness.
Over my lifetime I have known a number of very bright people, including some economists; and a number of very modest and kind people, also including some economists. But I have never met one who could excel Lloyd in the combination of ability, modesty and kindness.
This was true at Harvard where he was finishing his thesis when I first met him in 194’ [sic]. If a visitor asked then, “Who is your brightest graduate student?” the answer, without any hesitation was “Lloyd Metzler, of course.” If the question was, “Who is your nicest graduate student?” the answer was once again, “Lloyd, of course.” Ant the same was true at the Federal Reserve where he spent a couple of years during the War. It was true in his office, in the cafeteria, in the afternoon math class which he gave for the staff, and outside of that marble building which has lately appeared several times on TV. (Hard to believe now that in those days the interest rate of government securities was something like 2½ per cent.)
As Solzhenitsyn said, he “was the one righteous person without whom, as the saying goes, no city can stand. Neither can the whole world.”
LLOYD METZLER
(April 3, 1913—October 26, 1980)
by Paul A. Samuelson
[Excerpts]
That we should hold this memorial service in the Harvard Yard is fitting. Widener Library was Lloyd’s first stamping grounds after he came to Harvard in 1937 from Kansas. Later, when the Littauer building was new, he switched his battleground to the other side of where we now meet. In my mind’s eye, I can still see Lloyd Metzler walking across the Harvard Yard, with his little dachshund in tow, engaged in animated badinage with Bob Bishop or Dan Vandermeulen. A young resident of Winthrop House, destined to be president of the United States [John F. Kennedy], used to be disturbed in his studies by our revels in Lloyd’s Winthrop House tutorial suite.
…To be near K.U., the family finally moved to Lawrence, Kansas. There the spellbinder populist, John Ise, rescued Lloyd from the swamp of the business school. Just as Ise had done with Ed Mason, and as he was to do with John Lintner, Challis Hall, and a host of other sons of the middle border, Ise sent Metzler on to his old graduate student at Harvard.
Harold Hitchings Burbank, noting the Germanic “z” in Lloyd’s name and recognizing his egregious talent, probably mistook him for a Jew…Like other able people Burbank didn’t favor, Lloyd was put in the galleys of Frickey and Crum, to serve as assistant in the undergraduate courses in statistics and accounting. Since I never had that honor, I can with good grace report that the cream of the graduate school, those who have won the Wells Prizes and top honors of our profession, all came from this Burbank ghetto.
…What is in order is to speak of Wassily Leontief and E.B. Wilson We few mathematical economists at Harvard were blessed by these great teachers…Wilson spotted Metzler’s genius. One of President Conant’s few stupid decisions was to retire Wilson at the earliest possible age, and this in a period of teacher shortages, thereby depriving the post-Metzler generations of the consumers’ surplus that Metzler, I, Bergson, Tsuru, Alexander, and some other happy few enjoyed.
That, however , was par for the critics of mathematical economics. In the year that Metzler came to Harvard, Sidney Alexander was Keynes’s last tutee at Cambridge University. Keynes seriously advised Alexander not to waste his time with mathematical economics…
…All in all, Lloyd Metzler added enormously to economic science. And that sense of humor and sweet nature lives on in our happy memories.
Note: Samuelson’s complete remarks at the memorial service were published in The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson, Vol. V (Kate Crowley, ed.) pp. 827-830. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986.
Source: Duke University. Rubenstein Library. Papers of Evsey Domar, Box 6, Folder “Correspondence: Lloyd Metzler etc.”
Image Source: “Lloyd A. Metzler/Fellow: Awarded 1942/Field of Study: Economics”John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Webpage .