True confession: today’s post was inspired by something less than the purest of motives to advance our understanding of the history of economics. Indeed current events inspired me to check my files of Harvard educational materials to see if I had anything related to Henry Rosovsky who rose from mild-mannered economics professordom to the status of an academic mover-and-shaker at the pinnacle of the Harvard administrative hierarchy. But wait, there’s more. Like pre-President Donald J. Trump, Dean Rosovsky was among the contributors to the 50th Birthday Album of Jeffrey Epstein and it is there that we find the specially commissioned piece of art of Annie Sprinkle, “Tit Print ’2002”.
Image from House Oversight The First Fifty Years, pp. 167-168.
“Request No. 1.pdf” as long as supplies last.
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Now that Economics in the Rear-view Mirror’s click-bait has you on its line, read on to find something about the course on the economic development of China and Japan jointly offered by Henry Rosovsky and his colleague Dwight Perkins during the fall term of 1966-67 at Harvard.
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Memorial Minute —
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Henry Rosovsky, 95
At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 2, 2023, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Henry Rosovsky was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
Henry Rosovsky, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Emeritus, died on Nov. 11, 2022, at the age of 95. Twice dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), twice acting president of the University, and the only active faculty member to serve on the Harvard Corporation since the 1880s, Henry was one of Harvard’s great leaders in the 20th century and probably the most important dean of the FAS ever.
Born in 1927 in the Free City of Danzig, Henry fled the Nazi occupation and arrived in America in 1940. Immediately following the war, he served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps in occupied Germany, where he interviewed former Wehrmacht officers under the Allied-imposed denazification program and attended the Nuremberg trials. Returning to the U.S., he graduated from William and Mary on the G.I. Bill. Returning to the army, he served in wartime Korea and then in occupied Japan, where he learned Japanese and had his interest piqued by the country’s economic and cultural modernization.
After his second army stint, Henry entered graduate school at Harvard to study economics and was elected to the Society of Fellows. Writing his dissertation on Japanese capital formation between the Meiji Restoration and World War II, he earned his Ph.D. in 1959 and joined the Department of Economics at Berkeley. Dismayed by Berkeley’s student unrest, however, in 1965 he returned to Harvard as a professor of economics.
Back at Harvard, Henry played an increasingly central role within the FAS. In 1968 he chaired a committee that recommended a program to grant degrees in African and Afro-American Studies. The next year he became chairman of the Department of Economics. In 1973 President Derek Bok appointed him Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
For Henry, serving as dean was akin to an art form. His approach to the job was intensely personal. He understood that he was managing not Ford or IBM but a medium-sized (just over 400 tenured professors) collection of highly motivated individuals. He spent his time engaging with his faculty, not his staff. When he needed to make decisions regarding proposals not already within his sphere of direct knowledge, he would ask which half-dozen professors most wanted it to happen. He figured he would already know some of them well enough to understand their motivation and would sit down over lunch to talk with the others; then he would decide. He intuitively understood human aspirations and ambitions, and they fascinated him. He saw his role as fostering his faculty’s individual aims and nurturing their talent, while, nonetheless, maintaining a harmonious setting for a group enterprise.
Crucially for Harvard at that time, this personal approach built trust among his faculty. When Henry became dean, the divisions left from the 1960s student uprising were still bitter. Within the FAS, separate liberal and conservative “caucuses” met regularly, and tension between them impeded progress on multiple fronts. With Henry as dean, both groups soon disbanded. As many faculty members explained, “We all trust Henry.” Once the divisiveness dissipated, Henry was able to advance important educational reforms, most notably the Core Curriculum — the first restructuring of Harvard’s undergraduate General Education since its introduction in 1949. Another key achievement was reducing graduate school admissions in response to the end of the extraordinary post-war growth surge in American higher education.
Part of what made Henry’s personal touch so effective was his keen awareness of his own unusual insider/outsider status: his experience of having had his life turned upside down; the humiliation of flight and refugee rejection; the irony of a Jew standing at the top of one of America’s premier bastions of WASP privilege. In a story that he sometimes recounted, usually with a sardonic yet elegiac tone, one of the former Wehrmacht officers he interviewed after the war asked him, “Sergeant, where did they teach you German? You speak perfectly, but you have the vocabulary of a 10-year-old.” It was vintage Henry: funny, yes, but aching with unspoken loss — of a civilization and the people who created it; of a refugee achiever who had lost a golden youth to hatred.
Another key trait of Henry’s leadership was courage. The African and Afro-American Studies proposal was controversial enough within the academy, but also elicited passions, sometimes ugly ones, more broadly. Al Capp, the newspaper cartoonist long associated with the Li’l Abner strip and a Cambridge resident, launched a vicious campaign to oppose Harvard’s initiative and, in the process, to vilify Rosovsky personally. Henry did not cower before Mr. Capp. His public bravery was a welcome mark of integrity and dedication on the part of American higher education. Years later, when Henry returned as dean for President Bok’s last year, together they went to extraordinary efforts to make two distinguished appointments that cemented the department’s preeminence in the field.
Henry was exceptionally loyal to Harvard as well. In 1977 he was offered the presidency of Yale. At the time, to pick as president someone without a Yale degree — and a Jew besides — was unprecedented. Yet Henry declined, choosing to remain at Harvard and complete the Core Curriculum review, which he guided to faculty approval the next spring. Beyond loyalty, Henry had a deep and abiding love for Harvard, an infectious emotional pull that proved especially effective in his efforts as dean to recruit new faculty members.
Henry was also a stalwart supporter of Harvard’s Jewish community. As dean he helped Harvard Hillel move from Bryant Street to Mount Auburn Street, first in a recently vacated building and then on a plot of open ground where in 1994 Hillel erected a new building: Rosovsky Hall. As Henry famously put it, Hillel at Harvard thereby moved “from the periphery to the center.” Some two decades later, Hillel launched its new capital campaign with a grand dinner celebrating Henry’s 90th birthday.
Henry was devoted to his family: Nitza, his wife of 66 years, who was born a seventh-generation Jerusalemite, and their children, Leah, Judy, and Michael.
Respectfully submitted,
Derek C. Bok
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Michael McCormick
Benjamin M. Friedman, Chair
Source: The Harvard Gazette, 4 May 2023.
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Meet Dwight H. Perkins
Dwight H. Perkins is the Harold Hitchings Burbank Research Professor of Political Economy of Harvard University, where he joined the faculty in 1963. Previous positions at Harvard include Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, 1963-2006; Associate Director of the East Asian (now Fairbank) Research Center, 1973-1977; chairman of the Department of Economics, 1977-1980; Director of the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID), the University’s former multi-disciplinary institute for research, teaching, and technical assistance on development policy,1980-1995; and Director of the Harvard University Asia Center, 2002-2005.
Source: Harvard Square Library. Digital library of Unitarian Universalist biographies, history, books, and media.
Dwight Perkins has authored or edited twelve books and over one hundred articles on economic history and economic development, with special references to the economies of China, Korea, Vietnam and the other nations of east and southeast Asia. Topics include the transition from central planning to the market, long-term agricultural development, industrial policy, the underlying sources of growth in East Asia, and the role of economic and legal institutions in East Asian growth. He has served as an advisor or consultant on economic policy and reform to the governments of Korea, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. He has also been a long-term consultant to the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, various private corporations, and agencies of the U.S. government, including the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (then chaired by Senator Henry M. Jackson). He has been a Visiting Professor or Scholar at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, the University of Washington, and Fudan University in Shanghai. He also served as a Phi Beta Kappa Lecturer at eight colleges and universities around the U.S. in 1993-94. In 1997 he taught for a semester at the Fulbright Economic Training Program in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and has continued to teach in that program for several weeks each year since 1997. He and has given individual lectures to numerous audiences in the U.S., Asia, Europe, and elsewhere. Dwight Perkins served in the U.S. Navy (active duty 1956-58), received his B.A. from Cornell University in Far Eastern Studies in 1956, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1961 and 1964. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society and of various professional organizations in the fields of economics and Asian Studies.
7/2006
Source: Harvard biography page for Dwight H. Perkins from 2016.
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Course Announcement and Description
Economics 146. The Economic Development of China and Japan
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., S., at 9. Professor H. Rosovsky and Associate Professor D. H. Perkins.
Contrasting problems of economic development in China (pre-Communist and Communist periods) and Japan. Among the topics covered are the role of government in economic development, strategies of development, planning, measurement of national income, and the effect of monetary and fiscal policies on development.
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Department of Economics
Economics 14
THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
OF CHINA AND JAPAN
Fall Term, 1966
Professor Henry Rosovsky
Professor Dwight Perkins
Students who haven’t taken Economics 1 or its equivalent or have not taken it recently should read B. Higgins, Economic Development, Chapters 1 and 8 (Section II); P. Samuelson, Economics: An Introductory Analysis (5th Edition), Chapters 32 (Section III), 11 (Section IV), 12, 13, 15, 16, 17 (Section IX); and C. P. Kindleberger, International Economics, Chapter 5.
I. STRATEGY OF DEVELOPMENT
READINGS
China
A. Eckstein, Communist China’s Economic Growth and Foreign Trade, pp. 1-86.
Japan
H. Rosovsky, Capital Formation in Japan, Chapter IV, pp. 55-104.
REFERENCES
China
C. M. Li, Economic Development of Communist China.
Y. L. Wu, The Economy of Communist China.
W. W. Rostow, The Prospects for Communist China (1954).
T. J. Hughes and D.E.T. Luard, The Economic Development of Communist China.
N. R. Chen, The Economy of Mainland China, 1949-1963: A Bibliography of Materials in English.
H. T. Patrick and P. Schran, “Economic Contrasts: China, India and Japan,” Journal of International Affairs, 1963, No. 2, pp. 168-184.
II. PREREQUISITES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH
A. The Role of Government
READINGS
China
P. Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy, Chapters 1, 3, 4, pp. 3-12, 28-54.
M. Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism, Chapters 1, 2, 8.
A. Feuerwerker, China’s Early Industrialization, Chapters 1, 2, 4, 7.
Japan
W. W. Lockwood, The Economic Development of Japan, Chapters 1, 10.
D. S. Landes, “Japan and Europe: Contrasts in Industrialization,” in W. W. Lockwood, ed., The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan, pp. 93-182.
H. Rosovsky, “Japan’s Transition to Modern Economic Growth,” in Rosovsky, ed., Industrialization in Two Systems (1966).
T. C. Smith, Political Change and Industrial Development in Japan (1955).
R. P. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan (1965), Chapter X.
B. Entrepreneurship and Other Sociological Prerequisites of Economic Growth.
READINGS
China & Japan
M. J. Levy, “Contrasting Factors in the Modernization of China and Japan,” Kuznets et al., eds., Economic Growth: Brazil, India, Japan, pp. 496-536.
Japan
J. Hirschmeier, “Shibusawa Eiichi: Industrial Pioneer,” in Lockwood, ed., The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan, pp. 209-248.
T. C. Smith, “Landlords’ Sons in the Business Elite,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, IX, I, Part II, October 1960.
G. Ranis, “The Community Centered Entrepreneur in Japanese Development,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, December 1955.
K. I. Choi, “Tokugawa Feudalism and the Emergence of the New Leaders of Early Modern Japan,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, Dec. 1956.
REFERENCES
China
T. Metzger, “Ch’ing Commercial Policy,” Ch’ing-Shih Wen-t’i, February 1966.
Japan
W. W. Lockwood, ed., The State and Economic Enterprise in Modern Japan, Chapters I, IV, V, VIII.
C. D. Sheldon, The Rise of the Merchant Class in Tokugawa Japan (1958).
H. Passin, Society and Education in Japan (1965), Part II.
J. Hirschmeier, The Origins of Entrepreneurship in Modern Japan (1964).
Elichi Kiyooka (trans.) The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi.
III. EXTERNAL RELATIONS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH
READINGS
China & Japan
G. C. Allen, Western Enterprise in Far Eastern Economic Development, Part II.
China
C. M. Hou, “External Trade, Foreign Investment, and Domestic Development: The Chinese Experience, 1840-1937,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. X, No. 1, October 1961, pp. 21-41.
A. Eckstein, op. cit., pp. 135-182.
Japan
W. W. Lockwood, The Economic Development of Japan, Chapters 6, 7.
M. Shinohara, “Economic Development and Foreign Trade in Japan,” in C.D. Cowan, ed., The Economic Development of China and Japan.
REFERENCES
China
C. M. Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, 1840-1937.
S. Ishikawa, “Strategy of Foreign Trade Under Planned Economic Development with Special Reference to China’s Experience,” Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics, January 1965, pp. 27-57.
IV. NATIONAL INCOME MEASUREMENT
READINGS
China
R. W. Campbell, Soviet Economic Power, Chapter 3.
T. C. Liu and K. C. Yeh, The Economy of the Chinese Mainland, pp. 17-70.
Japan
K. Okawa and H. Rosovsky, “A Century of Japanese Economic Growth,” in Lockwood, ed., The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan, pp- 47-92.
A. Maddison, “Japanese Economic Performance,” Banca Nazionale del Lavoro Quarterly Review, No. 75, December 1965.
REFERENCES
China
A. Eckstein, The National Income of Communist China (1952).
W. W. Hollister, China’s Gross National Product and Social Accounts 1950-1957.
K. Chao, The Rate and Pattern of Industrial Growth in Communist China.
C. M. Li, The Statistical System of Communist China.
S. Ishikawa, National Income and Capital Formation in Mainland China.
Japan
K. Okawa and H. Rosovsky, “Economic Fluctuations in Prewar Japan,” Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics, October 1962.
K. Okawa, The Growth Rate of the Japanese Economy.
H. Rosovsky, “The Statistical Measurement of Japanese Economic Growth,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, October 1958.
V. AGRICULTURE
READINGS
China
R. H. Tawney, Land and Labour in China (entire).
D. Perkins, Market Control and Planning in Communist China, Chapters III-IV, pp. 21-98.
Japan
K. Ohkawa and H. Rosovsky, “The Role of Agriculture in Modern Japanese Economic Development,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. IX, No. 1, October 1960, pp. 43-67.
W. W. Lockwood, ed., The State and Economic Enterprise…, Chapter VI.
R. P. Dore, “Agricultural Improvement in Japan, 1870-1900,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, IX, I, Part II (October 1960).
B. F. Johnston and R. W. Melor, “The Role of Agriculture in Economic Development,” American Economic Review, September 1961.
REFERENCES
China
K. R. Walker, Planning in Chinese Agriculture: Socialization and the Private Sector, 1956-1962.
Japan
T. C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan.
R. P. Dore, Land Reform in Japan.
Japan FAO Organization, A Century of Technical Development in Japanese Agriculture.
VI. CAPITAL
READINGS
R. Nurkse, Problems of Capital formation in Underdeveloped Countries, Introduction, Chapters I-III.
Japan
G. Ranis, “The Financing of Japanese Economic Development,” Economic History Review, XI, 3 (1959), pp. 440-454.
H. Rosovsky, “Capital Formation in Prewar Japan,” in Cowan, ed., The Economic Development of China and Japan.
REFERENCES
China
W. W. Hollister, “Capital Formation in Communist China,” The China Quarterly, January-March 1954, pp. 39-55.
Japan
H. Rosovsky, Capital Formation in Japan, Chapters I-III.
J. C. Abegglen, The Japanese Factory.
T. Watanabe, “Economic Aspects of Dualism in the Industrial Development of Japan,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, April 1965.
VII. PLANNING
READINGS
R. W. Campbell, Soviet Economic Power, Chapter 5.
O. Lange and F. M. Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism, pp. 55-129.
Chou En-lai, “Report on the Proposals for the Second Five-Year Plan for Development of the National Economy,” Bowie and Fairbank, eds., Communist China 1955-1959, Document 11, pp. 216-242.
Li Fu-chun, “On the Big Leap Forward in China’s Socialist Construction,” Bowie and Fairbank, eds., op. cit., Document 47, pp. 587-596.
D. Perkins, Market Control and Planning in Communist China, Chapters V-VI, pp. 99-135.
B. G. Hickman, ed., Quantitative Planning of Economic Policy, Chapters IX & X.
S. Tsuru, “Rapid Growth with Formal Planning Divorced from Action: Japan,” in E. E. Hagen, ed., Planning Economic Development.
REFERENCE
Japanese Government, Economic Planning Agency, New Long-Range Economic Plan of Japan, 1961-1970 (Doubling National Income Plan).
VIII. MONETARY AND FISCAL POLICY
READINGS
China
Chang Kia-ngau, The Inflationary Spiral, The Experience of China, 1939-1950, Chapters 1-5.
D. Perkins, Market Control and Planning in Communist China, Chapter VIII, pp. 154-176.
Japan
H. T. Patrick, “Cyclical Instability and Fiscal-Monetary Policy in Postwar Japan,” in Lockwood, ed., The State and Economic Enterprise…, pp. 555-618.
H. T. Patrick, “External Equilibrium and Internal Convertibility,” Journal of Economic History, June 1965.
REFERENCES
China
S. H. Chou, The Chinese Inflation, 1937-1949.
A. N. Young, China’s Wartime Finance and Inflation, 1937-1945.
F.H.H. King, Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1845-1895.
Japan
H. T. Patrick, Monetary Policy and Central Banking in Contemporary Japan.
IX. POSTWAR GROWTH IN JAPAN
READINGS
Ohkawa and Rosovsky, “Recent Japanese Growth in Historical Perspective,” American Economic Review, May 1963.
Lockwood, ed., The State and Economic Enterprise…, Chapter X.
REFERENCES
London Economist, Consider Japan.
G. C. Allen, Japan’s Economic Expansion.
Lockwood, ed., The State and Economic Enterprise…, Chapters XIII, XIV, XV.
S. B. Levine, Industrial Relations in Postwar Japan.
J. B. Cohen, Japan’s Economy, in War and Reconstruction.
Source: Harvard University Archives. Syllabi, course outlines and reading lists in Economics, 1895-2003. Box 9, Folder “Economics, 1966-1967”.
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Economics 146
Final Examination
January 1967
Part I
Answer either 1 or 2; 45 minutes
- Okawa and Rosovsky have made frequent use of the notion of a “differential structure”. Explain the meaning of the term, and critically discuss the explanatory value and empirical validity of the concept for Japanese economic growth in the twentieth century, and also in the future.
- “’There is nothing new under the sun’ does not apply to economics. What has happened to the Japanese economy in the post World War II period is in almost all respects ‘new’.” Discuss both the true and false aspects of this statement.
Part II
Answer question 3; no choice; 45 minutes
- The word planning covers many different ways of organizing and controlling an economy. In what sense are China and Japan’s post-war economies planned? How is balance (coordination of inputs and outputs) achieved in the two systems? How is efficiency (more output for a given input or less input for a given output) achieved in the two systems?
Part III
Answer question 4; no choice; 60 minutes
- Write an essay on the relevance of the Japanese developmental experience for China. Be specific and make reference to your readings, and make perfectly clear what historical periods are referred to for each country.
Part IV
Write a short paragraph on any four of the following; 30 minutes
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- T’ung Chih Restoration
- Matsukata Deflation
- Economic Planning Agency (Keizai Kikaku-Cho)
- Rural People’s Commune
- Industrial and commercial tax, i.e., “turnover tax”
- Treaty Tariff (China)
Source: Harvard University. Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Papers Printed for Mid-Year Examinations. History, History of Religions, Government, Economics,…, January, 1967.
Image Source: “Henry Rosovsky, Former Harvard FAS Dean, Remembered for Contributions to Undergrad Education and African American Studies,” The Harvard Crimson, 5 December 2022. Cropped and polished by Economics in the Rear-view Mirror.
