Donald J. Harris

Some Lesser Known Facts About Donald J. Harris

• He grew up in Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica.

• His parents belonged to the Caribbean Creole ethnicity, one of Jamaica’s largest indigenous groups.

• His paternal grandmother, Chrishy, was the descendant of Hamilton Brown a plantation and slave owner. he was also the founder of Brown’s Town where Donald J. Harris was born.

• His surname ‘Harris’ comes from his paternal grandfather, Joseph Alexander Harris who was a land-owner and an exporter of agricultural food products such as pimento and allspice.

• He received his baptism in the Anglican Church and served as an acolyte (assistant to the priest) during his childhood.

• He was a member of the Debating Society, Inter-Club Committee, Guild Publications Committee and the President of the Economics Society while studying at the University College of the West Indies.

  

• He represented Taylor Hall in hockey.

  

• In 1962, he gave a talk at the Afro-American Association at the University of California, Berkeley. After his speech, he was approached by Shyamala Gopalan, who was intrigued and curious about his speech.

• In an interview, he stated that he found her curiosity charming, and said,
  

  We talked then, continued to talk at a subsequent meeting, and at another, and another.”

• His daughter, Kamala Harris has claimed that she was inspired by her parents participating in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. She has also claimed that he taught her to be fearless.

  

• He worked as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, from 1966 to 1967.

• In 1968, he worked as a Ford Foundation Visiting Fellow at the Delhi School of Economics, India.

• He worked as an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wisconsin, from 1968 to 1972.

• Donald J. Harris divorced his wife in 1971. Although their children were raised mostly by his wife, they would often visit him in Jamaica during their childhood.

  

• He wasn’t happy with the custody process of the divorce and expressed his frustration over it as the Californian court ruled that fathers cannot handle parenting.

• He worked as an assistant professor at Stanford University from 1972 to 1998 and is recognised as an emeritus professor at the University.

• He is also the first black scholar to work as a professor at Stanford’s Department of Economics.

• He taught the ‘Theory of Capitalist Development’ and helped develop a new program of graduate study in ‘Alternative Approaches to Economic Analysis’ while working at Stanford University.

• In 1976, The Stanford Daily called him a Marxist scholar and noted him for not following neo-Classical economics.

• He has authored several books and has more than 100 publications under his name.

• In 1978, he published a book titled, ‘Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution.’ The book is dedicated to his children, the 49th Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris and lawyer Maya Harris.

• He started working for his country, Jamaica, as an economic consultant in the late 1980s.

• In the early 1990s, he became a senior economic advisor of Jamaica under the leadership of then Prime Minister, P.J. Patterson.

• He helped create the National Industrial Policy in 1996 for the Government of Jamaica to help them create a better economic and social life.

• In 1998, he retired from the teaching profession.

• In 2010, the Planning Institute of Jamaica, a government organisation that focuses on Jamaica’s development policies, commissioned him to become an advisor.

• In 2011, he developed the ‘Growth Inducement Strategy’ credited for Jamaica’s economic growth.

• In 2018, he wrote an essay titled ‘Reflections of a Jamaican Father,’ describing how his grandmothers, Chrishy and Iris, influenced him during his childhood.

• In the essay, he stated that his paternal grandmother, Chrishy, generated his interest in economics and politics as he would observe her while she took care of her dry-goods store.

• He credits his maternal grandmother, Iris, and the time spent with her on her farm as helping him understand the system of global production and commerce based on slave labour and Jamaica’s role in it.

• In 2020, after Kamala Harris joked about using marijuana as she grew up in Jamaica, Donald Haris criticised her comments for promoting stereotypes in an interview and said,
  

  My dear departed grandmothers … as well as my deceased parents must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics.”

• In 2021, he received Jamaica’s third-highest honour, the Order of Merit for his contribution to the development of Jamaica.

• He is a well-known proponent of Post-Keynesian economics, a school of thought which originated from the Economist John Maynard Keynes’ book, ‘ The General Theory.’

• He considers the works of Joan Robinson, Maurice Dobb, Piero Sraffa, Michal Kalecki, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, and W. Arthur Lewis as an influence on his work.

• He is a travel enthusiast and has visited several countries, including, Canada, England, Holland, France, Italy, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Thailand.

• He has worked as a consultant to several organisations, including the United Nations (UN), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the World Bank etc.