OBITUARIES I Jesus College Annual Report 2022
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Obituaries Emeritus Fellows Professor Geoffrey Harcourt was born on 27 June 1931 and died on 7 December 2021 aged 90. Geoff was a Fellow and College Lecturer in Economics at Jesus College from 1982-1998. He was President of the College from 1988-1989 and again from 1990-1992 and became an Emeritus Fellow of the College on his retirement in 1998. He was a University Lecturer from 1982-1990 and Reader in the History of Economic Theory from 1990-1998 in the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge. Geoff was committed to alleviating poverty and fighting against social and racial discrimination through his work. In later life, he became one of Australia’s most eminent economists. Geoff authored or edited 29 books and published over 380 articles, chapters in books and reviews. His publications included The Structure of Post-Keynesian Economics and the two-volume The Oxford Handbook of Post-Keynesian Economics. His most celebrated work was Some Cambridge Controversies in the Theory of Capital, published in 1972 and about an argument between economists from the University of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA over the nature of capital. Cambridge University Press recently published a 50th anniversary edition, and his preface was the last thing he ever wrote, dedicating the edition with “immense gratitude” to his wife, Joan. Geoff was born in Melbourne, Australia into a warm-hearted secular Jewish family. His paternal grandparents Israel and Dinah Harkowitz had moved to Australia from Romania (Transylvania) and Poland in the 19th century. His maternal grandparents Daniel and Edith Gans came from Germany and originally Lithuania. Geoff’s father, Kopel Harkowitz, changed the family name from Harkowitz to Harcourt, in order – the family says – “to ease access into sports and social clubs”. Geoff struggled at school and received support from his very academic twin brother, John. He won a place at the University of Melbourne, however, where he excelled in his studies as an undergraduate in the Commerce Department and then as a postgraduate student at Queen’s College (where he was tutored by eminent Labour Economist, Joe Isaac). It was in Melbourne that Geoff met Joan Bartrop, who was from Ballarat and who worked for the Melbourne Institute on their research into poverty and social housing policy. They married straight after Geoff’s graduation in 1955. The first decision made by Geoff and Joan as newlyweds was for Geoff to accept a PhD scholarship to study at King’s College at the University of Cambridge, the College of the eminent British Economist John Maynard Keynes. In Cambridge, Geoff immersed himself in ‘Keynes’s Circle’, the students and heirs of Keynes himself, famous economists like Nicholas Kaldor, Richard Kahn, Piero Sraffa and Geoff’s personal hero, Joan Robinson. He later co-wrote the definitive intellectual biography of her, and argued, like many others, that she should have been the first woman to win the Economics Nobel Prize (Joan later offered him one of his first lectureships at Cambridge). It was during this period at King’s College that he became aware of the debates between the economists of Cambridge,
