By Mun S. Ho
Dale Jorgenson was my Ph.D. thesis advisor, and mentor for the past 38 years. He was a Professor in the Harvard Economics Department from 1969 and was teaching classes via Zoom during the Covid-19 lockdown before he retired at age 87. He was one of the founding members of the faculty committee that established what is now the Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy and Environment in 1993, and welcomed the newest two research visitors to the China Project with a dinner together with his wife Linda two weeks before he left us, aged 89. He led the organization of the biennial world productivity conferences (WorldKLEMS), and that was last held in March 2021. Our last published paper was in the Review of Development Economics in 2020 (Jing Cao, Mun Ho, Wenhao Hu and Dale Jorgenson, “Urban Household Consumption in China: Price, Income and Demographic Effects”).
The energy and sharp mind of Dale, even as an octogenarian, is legendary. We would often go to conferences in China and Japan, and I would always try to arrive a day or two earlier to get over the jet lag before the meetings. Dale would get off the plane and go straight to the big dinner or give a speech. He went to the gym every week until it was shut by Covid-19.
Our last trip to Beijing, before the world went to a travel lockdown, was in October 2019 for the Asia KLEMS conference, a meeting of economists studying productivity and growth in Asia. This is a photo of Dale making the keynote speech at Tsinghua University:
Dale and Linda were connoisseurs of fine dining, and always generous in taking me, and everyone else, out. This is a photo of them hosting his students, and co-authors, HU Wenhao and CAO Jing, during that Beijing conference (no prizes for guessing the cameraman):
I won’t give you a history of his enormous contributions to economics, as there is this timely piece by his former student John Fernald, or the memoriam at the Economics Department website, or the Wall Street Journal obituary, or his Wikipedia page.
My first contact with Dale was the Econometrics course required of first year Harvard graduate students in 1983. The style of his delivery and course content were the subjects of many a skit at the annual Departmental Christmas parties. He hired me as a research assistant that summer after looking at the paper we wrote for that course, and after I told him I know Fortran and double-entry bookkeeping. He offered a handsome wage of $10/hour, and I felt rich for the first time.
That RA job put me in the Program on Technology and Economy Policy offices in the Kennedy School and introduced me to his group of Ph.D. students and other visiting researchers.
Learning from Dale happened this way: He assigned you a project. Which, in my case, involved learning models and code written by previous students. Then you met him once a week.
“What have you done this week?”
“Well, I added these equations to the model, but the Walras Law error came back. I am debugging it.”
“You are making excellent progress.”
The system he set up involved learning from older students. In Jorgland I learnt from Kun-young Yun, who graduated just prior to my arrival, from Frank Gollop’s and Barbara Fraumeni’s programs, and from the papers by Larry Lau and Tom Stoker. And I learnt in-person from Frank Wolak, Pete Wilcoxen, Dan Slesnick, Daekuen Park, Dick Goettle, and Ardo Hanson. Dale’s papers, after his first few theory ones, are empirical. But he didn’t need to know any computer programming himself to write them, as he has set up a network of partners who were good coders and taught them to implement his vision. (This may sound odd to younger readers, but you have to visualize the late 1970s when few students were good at programming.) He found the right people to set up a sophisticated campus computing system, giving his students the earliest access to a mainframe (VAX station) and access to the Arpanet. Jorgland got email addresses in the early 1980s, something to show off to our contemporaries.
Okay, his vision. There is this joke about Dale being a hedgehog, not a fox. And the joke about him discovering, in the 1970s, that the world is translog. Let me explain for those who are unfamiliar with our corner of economics. First, to cite the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, who according to Wikipedia, inspired Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox”: “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.”
Dale’s approach to economic modeling and measurement was grounded in a particular framework, which I will simplify and call the neoclassical framework. And within this general assumption about the economy was the use of a particular model of production and consumption – the translog production function and translog utility function. I did not check, but I think that every paper written by him since the 1970s involves the use of a translog function or index, explicitly or implicitly. (If you’d like to know what the translog looks like, go to the link to his last published paper given above.) One may criticize him for such an overly narrow focus, but this produced a coherent and consistent system of data, modeling and policy analysis that is unrivalled. His work in these areas is tied together in the 2013 book Double Dividend, which brings together the work he led with generations of students, not just those named on the cover.
The network of students and collaborators that he set up continues to contribute to the economics of productivity measurement, econometric estimation, and policy modelling throughout the world. Dale helped his co-authors in Japan set up similar research systems; through him I had the fortune to work with Masahiro Kuroda, Kazu Shimpo and Koji Nomura. I remember the many trips with him to the research arm of METI (Min. of Economy), where they sought his advice. He discussed economics with Prime Minister Abe in 2016 (more here). I also noticed then that he liked lots of soy sauce with his rice. He recruited Richard Garbaccio to work with us on China economics, and I had the chance to travel with Richard to China in 1996 for my first trip there. That was the start of the rich and long economics component of the Harvard-China Project.
Dale’s major network in economic measurement is the World KLEMS consortium (that stands for Kapital, Labor, Energy, Materials and Services). He was the driving force behind it and you can check out the World KLEMS website, as I cannot include the long list of partners here. My big personal benefit from this particular collaboration is the opportunity to travel to many parts of the world, meet many other people, and learn new things. Not to mention enjoying the cuisines of the world.
After I graduated, Dale trained or influenced another generation of students: QIAN Yingyi, William Perraudin, Bent Sorensen (a post-doc), Taeyoon Sung, Eric Yip, Jack Porter, Billy Pizer, John Fernald, Kevin Stiroh, Lauren Johnston, Jose Garcia, Warren Hrung, Karen Fisher-Vanden, Khoung Vu, Jon Samuels, Marta Arranz, CAO Jing, HUI Jin, SHI Yu, and Anil Somani. I co-authored papers with seven of these students, and learnt from all. Dale learnt from them too, as they are great economists and now prominent in their fields. Karen’s and CAO Jing’s theses involve China and were the start of the long series of collaborations with Dale, Richard Garbaccio and me. Kevin, Jon and Khoung worked on productivity which led to many subsequent publications with Dale and me. This 2005 book on US productivity is the first by Kevin and me, but is Dale’s umpteenth. John’s great recollection of Dale, again, is here. But before this more recent work, at that time, when they were students in the 1990s, it was a time for us to play basketball or to watch the Red Sox or the World Cup after our meetings with Dale.
One can talk about his work all day, but the most important thing in his life was Linda. They celebrated their 50th anniversary last year. Everyone who knew them remarks how difficult it is to believe that Mr. Formality would have a loving life partner who is so unlike him. I cannot talk about my time with Dale without talking about Linda, the partner who found time to travel to those economics conferences in between busily serving her law firm clients.
The big event for me in that 90s decade was my meeting my future wife Chorching, a meeting orchestrated by people in our office and Linda. The end result was that Linda and Dale threw an engagement party for us at their house, an event of my lifetime which I am forever grateful for. Two photos from that 1999 party:
Linda not only cooked but took most of the photos and that is why I don’t have many of her to show, this from the days before the smartphone. Then they came to our wedding, all the way to Malaysia, making our special day an extraordinary memory. Such was their generous spirit.
Pete, Dick and I had day-long meetings in Dale’s office when we were working on IGEM (our US model), analyzing environmental policies. Linda would have Dale bring in a big box of goodies for us. Dale was very disciplined and seldom touched them, but I would gratefully finish them off (it takes some energy to discuss with him). Those meetings may have involved dial-in partners, who Dale would call after consulting the list of phone numbers in his folder. This use of hand-written lists is something he did not discard with the arrival of smartphones. Dale was a creature of habit, and another constant was our group lunch at the Faculty Club. I never succeeded in getting him to go to Charlie’s Kitchen (the hamburger bar next to the Kennedy School), although Frank Wolak might have in his time.
Here I also want to remember the key role that Trina Ott played in Jorgland, as Dale’s staff assistant for the past 18 years who helped to organize the WorldKLEMS conferences, his interaction with undergraduates, and keeping those IGEM meetings hydrated.
I started out by noting Dale’s activities with the Harvard-China Project. Let me note that the collaboration between him, Michael McElroy of the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, and other professors from across Harvard was a rare example of interfaculty joint work at Harvard at that time. I, and I am sure Dale, found our work there with Chris Nielsen, Dwight Perkins, and others to be most productive and satisfying even when there were obstacles to overcome. Dale didn’t speak Chinese but knew many scholars from China and travelled there almost every other year since the 1990s. I have gone on this China-learning journey inspired by him and met many other China scholars that have become our friends and co-authors, including REN Ruoen, LI Shantong, ZHAI Fan, HE Jianwu, Harry Wu, LIANG Huifang, GUO Xiaolin, HU Wenhao, MA Rong and LI Jianglong. I can safely say that Dale promoted mutual understanding among the scholars of these and other countries, something important in this era of deteriorating international relations.
My meetings in the past year with Dale were mostly about our projects with our partners in China, and about our US economic measurements with Jon Samuels. We were making plans for research on both China and US productivity and environmental issues. Those collaborations have to exclude him now, but the legacies that Dale fostered, I am sure, will live on through the many people that he inspired. When I feel lazy, I’ll just keep in mind that he retired at 87.