Mason Gaffney · Lablypedia

In a nutshell

Merrill Mason Gaffney (October 18, 1923 – July 16, 2020) was an American economist and a major critic of Neoclassical economics from a Georgist point of view. Gaffney first read Henry George's masterwork Progress and Poverty as a high school junior. This interest led him to Harvard University in 1941 but, unimpressed with their approach to economics he left in 1942 to join the war effort. After serving in the southwest Pacific during World War II he earned his B.A. in 1948 from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In 1956 he gained a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. There he addressed his teachers' skepticism about Georgism with a dissertation titled "Land Speculation as an Obstacle to Ideal Allocation of Land." Gaffney was Professor of Economics at the University of California, Riverside from 1976 onwards. He died in July 2020 at the age of 96.

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Career

Gaffney was a professor of economics at several universities; a journalist with TIME, Inc.; a researcher with Resources for the Future; the head of the British Columbia Institute for Economic Policy Analysis, which he founded; an economic consultant to several businesses and government agencies; and a frequent speaker on economic topics, domestic and foreign, and in political campaigns. He was elected as a Director of Robert Schalkenbach Foundation in 1984.

Gaffney had a wide and varied professional career. His professional positions included:

University of Oregon 1953-54 Instructor
North Carolina State University 1954-1958 assistant professor
University of Missouri, 1958-62 associate professor and professor of agricultural economics
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 1962-1969 professor of economics; department chair 1963–1965
UCLA 1967- visiting professor of economics
Resources for the Future, Washington, DC 1969-1973 senior research associate
British Columbia Institute for Economic Policy Analysis, Victoria, B.C., 1973-1976 founder and director
University of California, Riverside 1976-2012 professor of economics, teaching both managerial economics in the (Graduate School of Administration) and economics.

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